Rants from the Hill: Scout's honorhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/rants-from-the-hill-scouts-honor
How I earned the excommunication merit badge.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

One of Henry Thoreau’s many prose lines of pure poetry (his poetry, by contrast, is as prosaic as the side of a milk carton) sings that “the bluebird carries the sky on his back.” It is a line almost as lovely as the bird itself. The mountain bluebird, which is the state bird of Nevada, is a year-round neighbor here on the Ranting Hill. Of course the profusion of bluebirds here may be due to the unfair advantage my daughters and I give them by mounting nesting boxes not only on our property but also (illegally, no doubt) on the public lands surrounding our home. There is hope in this small gesture of nailing little wooden homes into the tangled arms of junipers out here in the far reaches of the high desert.

Unfortunately, not all my associations with bluebirds are positive, for a bluebird restoration effort was my final merit badge project before being ejected from the Boy Scouts. To be more precise, I was formally excommunicated from scouting before managing to earn the cultishly named “Arrow of Light,” a rite-of-passage symbol which sounds like a cross between a cheap appropriation of Native American mythology and a thinly veiled secularization of a fundamentalist religious ideology. I realize that in saying this kind of thing I’ve stepped over an invisible line in our culture. Who rags on the Boy Scouts? Especially among those of us who deeply respect outdoor experience and wilderness skills—not to mention less practical character attributes like trustworthiness and honesty—there is something sacrosanct about scouting.

Photograph of the author's daughters placing a bluebird box in a juniper snag.

Before failing to become a Boy Scout I was, under duress, a Cub Scout. I made it just far enough to become a “Webelo,” which is Scouting’s equivalent of a “tween,” a boy no longer a cub but not yet whatever was supposed to come next. A man? A bear? An eagle? A fake Indian? (Webelos are referred to as a “tribe,” a designation my Native American friends fail to appreciate.) To make matters worse, “Webelos” was given the “backronym” of “WE’ll BELOyal Scouts,” which served as yet another reminder that the fundamental principle of the organization was unremitting conformity and respect for authority.

I submit as further evidence of this the “Cub Scout Promise,” by which we were compelled to swear allegiance to God and country and to “obey the Law of the Pack,” which sounded vicious and scary. Worse still was the “Scout’s Law,” which enjoined us to be “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” Is this a reasonable standard for any kid? I suspect most parents would be satisfied with “Look, you don’t have to be reverent or brave. Just stop hitting your brother.”

As a boy I took seriously the moral imperative to achieve that long, aspirant list of noble traits—which is to say that I was from the beginning doomed to failure. The rhetoric of scouting invoked a weirdly “courteous” version of self-determination, even as in practice it required utter conformity. Scouting emphasized hierarchy and respect for authority, and it seems clear enough that profoundly anti-authoritarian nature lovers like Emerson and Thoreau—never mind Thomas Jefferson or Cactus Ed Abbey—would have made abominable Boy Scouts, an observation that provides me genuine comfort.

Back in those days there was a lot of pressure on us little scouts. Lots of performance tests and social comparisons and merit badges earned or, more often, endless strings of minor failures that prevented the earning of badges. In retrospect it all seems sufficiently ridiculous. Who even knows what it would mean to receive a merit badge in “Composite Materials”? Who really cares about achieving the “Coin Collecting” badge? (Better to earn the considerably more useful “Lifesaving” badge, so you can attempt to rescue your numismatist friends as they die of boredom.) How were we supposed to keep our priorities straight as we aspired to earn points in an organization where “Dentistry” and “Nuclear Science” had equal value? How were we to decide between “Insect Study” and “Welding,” between “Truck Transportation” and “Space Exploration”—all of which are actual Merit Badges?

It seems to me that “Wheelie Popping” or “Talking to Girls” or “Not Getting Your Ass Kicked by the Neighborhood Bully” or even “Fart Detection” would have been more useful than most of these merit badges. The value system of the entire enterprise appeared arbitrary and oppressive. If the camel was made by a committee, scouting seemed to have been created by a committee consisting of a Baptist missionary, an accountant, a government bureaucrat, a hippie back-to-the-lander, a marketing agency executive, a cigar store Indian, a New Age charlatan, and an undercover cop.

If you are speculating that the unhealthy energy around my not-so-warm-and-fuzzy memories of scouting suggests that I’m protesting too much—that I’m trying to cover something up—you are correct.

One lovely June my all-white “tribe” of Webelos was on an extended camping trip in the mountains, where we were commanded by Scoutmaster Williams, a man who took the “master” part of his moniker seriously. Master Williams was a “drop and give me twenty” kind of leader, though it was common knowledge among the boys that beneath his goofy uniform and hyperbolic Davy Crockett rhetoric was a plain old suburban dad, a henpecked, three-martini lunch, lawn-mowing, golf-playing, mid-level sales guy. While the forest smelled of pure freedom, being there with Master Williams was a highly regimented and competitive experience. We boys wanted to explore the woods, play hide-and-seek, scramble up rocks and go fishing. Under Master Williams’s leadership, our experience was instead the opposite of play.

I do not exaggerate when I say that we couldn’t dig a hole to take a shit without him turning the occasion into a competition—fastest hole, deepest hole, even roundest hole—and had there been a badge for meritorious dumping he would no doubt have adjudicated that contest as well. By the third night of the campout I had been forced to participate in so many competitions that I felt like an exhausted decathlete, only one whose events included boot waxing, dish washing, and melodic whistling. The only thing that pisses you off more than being forced to compete at whistling or scrubbing dishes is having your ass handed to you time and time again by the other boys, who seemed naturally to possess either the skills necessary to excel at such things, or the sheer drive to humiliate you in head-to-head competition. It may sound silly now, but at age eleven you just don’t want to be a loser every time, even if what you’re losing at is whistling or shithole digging. Why couldn’t I make that damned hole rounder?

On our third night Master Williams arranged yet another competition, this one to determine who could build the biggest, best, fastest fire using only a single match. This challenge had everything Master Williams liked best: implied masculine potency, a pretention to survival skills, the drama of a winner-take-all race to the finish, and immense potential for the utter humiliation of the losers. The idea was that we would each gather our own materials—tree bark, twigs, leaves, whatever—to first lay and then ignite a fire that would, if we were truly skilled, be the first to leap high enough to burn through a string that the Master had tied tightly between two trees.

Master Williams blew his whistle to begin the first phase of the contest, a mere five minutes in which we fanned out into the woods to collect whatever we judged to be the most flammable and therefore choicest materials. Already exhausted, I headed into a thick stand of brush beyond the muddy spot where my own leaky pup tent was pitched and began to rifle through the duff on the forest floor in search of something dry enough to assure victory. But everything I gathered was thoroughly damp; even spruce cones and the cups of acorns felt moist through and through. A feeling of dread gathered in me, my chest tightening and my breathing accelerating as the seconds remaining to find something ignitable ticked away.

When Master Williams whistled out the one-minute warning, I felt an utter sense of desperation and panic wash over me. It was in that moment of despair that I made an observation that would forever change the trajectory of my career as a scout. I noticed, sitting near the mouth of my little, green tent, the small, red can of Coleman fuel that we had used to refill one of the troop’s cook stoves. Grabbing the can I stepped behind my tent, squatted to the ground, and sprinkled some gas—and then a little more, just to be sure—onto the moist pinecones and twigs I had harvested from the forest floor. In that moment I was not thinking of my pledge to be “trustworthy.” I didn’t think about what I was doing at all. Something in the reptilian part of my

Boyscouts at Farragut State Park, North Idaho, in 1967. Courtesy Flickr user pieshops@gmail.com.

brain just felt—felt that I couldn’t face another defeat after the embarrassing drubbing I had taken in the melodic whistling and poop hole digging trials.

Arriving at the group just seconds in advance of disqualification, I now had five more whistled-off minutes to align and lay a fire consisting of my pathetic little sticks and cones. I stooped to one knee and hunched unsteadily over the spot where I would be tested, trying with trembling hands to construct the ideal little teepee-shape that was rising in front of the more capable boys working to my left and right. But the harder I tried the more my little stick umbrella collapsed, and I could feel Master Williams’s critical glare fall upon me, even as a tidy row of twig wigwams materialized up and down the line. The tension was palpable, the concentration intense. I knew what was at stake. This was the decisive test of who I was and who I would become. To build a fire. It was the ultimate primal challenge, the critical rite of passage into manhood.

At last the final whistle blew, and Master Williams counted down from ten, as if NASA were launching an Apollo rocket right there in the soggy woods. We ten truck driving dentist lifesaving welding coin collecting insect studying wood carving astronauts prepared for blast off. Three . . . two . . . one . . . ignition! Up and down the line I heard the synchronized scratch and pop of ten individual wooden matches as they were simultaneously struck. Each boy remained kneeling over his little stick tepee, cupping his precious flame with both hands and carefully lowering himself to touch the tiny flicker to just the right spot of bark or twig. The material had to be dry, the placement precise. That single, tiny, flickering point of sulfurous fire was all that stood between triumph and humiliation, and I guarded mine as a kind of eternal flame, one that would either be extinguished in a moment, or would burn brightly into manhood.

I balanced awkwardly on one knee, too afraid to shift position, and bent forward slowly, lowering toward my half-collapsed structure of twigs and cones, trying through sheer concentration to will that tiny flame to remain lit, trying one last time, in my little, collapsing world of inferior whistling and inadequately dug poop holes, to keep my hopes from being extinguished. I chose a promising spot in my stick pile and lowered the match slowly toward it.

I do not remember the moment in which the match made contact with my little pile of damp sticks. I do recall that the resulting detonation sounded like a concussion grenade, and that the rising fireball blew me backward onto my shoulder blades. There followed a welter of gasping and scurrying, and when I came to awareness I was looking up through swirling smoke at the face of Scoutmaster Williams, which wore an expression of genuine concern. I was coughing just a little, and the smell of singed hair was unmistakable.

“Son,” he said at last, “you’ve burned your damned eyebrows off. Are you alright?”

I nodded yes, though I didn’t have the slightest idea.

“You’re disqualified,” he added, flatly.

I don’t recall now whether I cried. The rest of my story is the unvarnished truth. Kicked-out scout’s honor.

]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssaysBlog Post2015/03/02 04:05:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: Hedgehog comes to the High Deserthttp://www.hcn.org/articles/copy_of_hedgehog-comes-to-the-high-desert
Welcoming a fifteen-million-year-old animal to the Ranting Hill“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

For a solid year now our eight-year-old daughter, Caroline, has been imploring us to get her a pet hedgehog. Nobody in the family can reckon where she got this idea in the first place—“hedgehog” has certainly never crossed my mind, let alone my lips—but it is deep within the grain of her nature to grasp an idea and refuse to let it go. Like a weasel or gator with jaws clenched, Caroline is incapable of giving up, a quality that makes her both difficult to live with and also, in some small, important way, my hero.

As Christmas approached, Caroline redoubled her efforts to get me to relent on the hedgehog, which meant that the hedgehog “discussion,” as my wife Eryn still insisted civilly upon calling it, had devolved into a Neanderthal battle between two of the most stubborn people ever to walk these bare, dry hills. Tenacious little Caroline tried every angle; I was equally unyielding.

“Dad, hedgehogs are the coolest animals ever to be on earth. Wait until you see how cool. It’s going to blow it out your mind!”

“Honey,” I replied, “we have hens that don’t lay eggs, a cat that won’t chase mice, and a dog that drools in gallons rather than ounces. The last thing I need is another useless pet to take care of.”

“Well, Daddy, I’m not sure I care for your attitude,” she observed coolly, turning one of my pet locutions against me.

“Honey, why can’t you just want a cellphone, like a normal kid?” I asked.

“Because normal kids want phones, like you said. But I’m unique! And a hedgehog is unique, so it’s definitely the thing for me,” she answered.

“Where did you learn the word unique?” I asked.

“Yeah, most kids my age don’t know it. That’s part of what makes me unique,” she insisted, a little proudly.

This standoff continued well into December, when Caroline came to us with what was billed as an important family announcement. She hated to have to go against our wishes, she declared, but she had decided it was necessary to skirt our opposition and instead ask Santa Claus to bring her the long-desired hedgehog. As evidence of her determination, she displayed her letter to Santa, which included the following appeal: “plese plese plese even though my mom says it is vary vary vary unlikely and my dad says did you bonk your head? PLESE PLESE PLESE get me a H E G H O G [followed by ten giant exclamation points].”

Caroline's letter to Santa Claus. MICHAEL BRANCH

Well, this was a new angle, and I was nonplussed. Eryn, who is both more intelligent and also quicker than her husband, wisely observed that Santa communicates regularly with parents, and that there’s practical collaboration, even in the magic that is Christmas morning.

“We’ll see,” said Caroline, defiantly. “Santa knows my heart.” And with that she spun on her heel and returned to her room, where she immediately planted her shoulder against the side of her dresser and, like a football player driving a tackling dummy, began to shove it away to make room for the hedgehog’s cage. Nothing we said made a lick of difference. This feisty little mule saw her new pet as a fait accompli, and so she remained perfectly resolute. “Santa knows my heart,” she repeated firmly.

In an essay I once referred to parenting as “the art of improvisation,” but it might just as well be glossed as “an interminable series of Catch 22s.” Eryn and I now faced a choice that seemed epic in significance. Through pure stubbornness, Caroline had placed us at a checkmate in which our “choice” was reduced to getting a hedgehog or blowing the lid on the Santa myth. How is it possible that parenting so often provides us with this kind of “choice”?

My wife remained respectful of my desire to live a long, happy, and entirely hedgehog-free life, and it pains me to confess that it was I who caved. One night after a few tumblers of sour mash, I told Eryn that I wasn’t prepared to be remembered as the guy who murdered Santa. “I don’t want the blood on my hands,” I said, in a moment of profound cowardice. “Please get a damned hedgehog.” And with that I poured another drink.

Arrangements were made, money changed hands, and on the morning of December 25 there was, beneath the tree, that most precious of Christmas miracles: an unwanted pet. When Caroline raced out to the living room to see that, indeed, Santa knew her heart, the look on her face conveyed a sublime combination of pure joy and “I told you so,” which I suspect is the only way pure joy can be improved upon.

Caroline gets her Christmas wish. MICHAEL BRANCH

Knowing just enough about captive-bred hedgehogs to suspect they’d likely make a terrible pet, especially for a kid, I tried to lower Caroline’s expectations without dampening her enthusiasm.

“CC, I’m really happy for you. But you need to know that this isn’t a warm and fuzzy pet, like a bunny. This guy is spiny, reclusive, and nocturnal. He might be hard to love.”

Eryn looked at me and smiled. “Well, Daddy,” she said, “there’s somebody else in this house who is spiny, reclusive, and nocturnal.”

As we rolled into the New Year, I found myself not only reconciled to “Uncle Hedgie,” as Caroline had named the little beast (though it might be Aunt Hedgie, for all we knew), but in fact fascinated by him. First of all, there was no denying that the thing was, to use a four-letter word that I’ve tried in vain to scrub from my personal lexicon, cute. He was a spiny little ball—larger than a baseball but smaller than a softball—with handsome salt-and-pepper coloration on his long spines. His small ears were delicately cupped and jet black, like a bat’s. The little eyes, glossy and bulbous, were also black. His face consisted of a long, narrow snout which, although not very porcine, had given rise to the “hog” part of his name. The tip of the snout was polished black, with small nostrils, and graced with long, downward-curving whiskers. Hedgie’s nose twitched constantly, suggesting an intelligent suspicion of the lumbering apes that gawked at him.

Uncle Hedgie joins the family. MICHAEL BRANCH

Of course I also admired his bad attitude. He spent almost all his time hiding under a piece of cloth. He was only active in the middle of the night. He didn’t enjoy being handled, and he never hesitated to prick up his spines when he was grouchy, which was most of the time. In a world full of pets bred to be affectionate and loyal—a saccharine world of kittens and puppies—here at last was an honest misanthrope. His best trick, which he performed at the slightest irritation, was to hiss loudly and convulse forward into a perfect ball of spines—one in which it was impossible to locate his face or his ass, or even to know whether he was in possession of either. This ability to become utterly spherical is why, in Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen commits the indignity of using hedgehogs as croquet balls. Back on this side of the looking glass, I can only imagine that a predator, upon seeing this prickly ball of trouble, might just scratch its head and walk away. In fact, I envied Uncle Hedgie this unassailable form of self-protection, and found myself wishing that I had the capacity to deploy something like it during meetings at work.

Uncle Hedgie balling up. MICHAEL BRANCH

The Ancient Greek poet Archilochus observed that “The fox has many tricks, and the hedgehog only one, but that is the best of all.” But Archilochus obviously lived in a time before toilet paper, because our hedgehog did have a second trick, and it was his best. Uncle Hedgie loved to stick his snout into a cardboard toilet paper core (which I slit to prevent it from lodging on his noggin), after which he staggered around waving it in the air like a tiny, spiny drunk. How could I not like this little guy?

I didn’t confess it to the family right away, but I had also been nerding it up by reading about hedgehogs. First of all, there were no living species native to the Americas, which is why we Yanks celebrate Groundhog Day in place of Hedgehog Day, a holiday that has inspired drunken revelry since the time of the ancient Romans. What intrigued me most was the ancient pedigree of the species. Despite his weird appearance and even weirder behavior, this animal hadn’t changed much in the past 15 million years. Given my own idiosyncratic behaviors, I was inspired with hope at the idea that weird had been working so well for so long. Hedgie wasn’t as ancient as a sponge or a jellyfish, but 15 million is a lot of evolutionary birthdays for a mammal. Think of local critters like coyotes and bobcats, which are a few million years old at best.

In fact, the hedgehog is so old that his resemblance to the porcupine and echidna is simply the product of convergent evolution, which is a fancy way of saying that because this is a world in which we might all do well to be covered with protective spines, different species developed this physiological defense mechanism through completely unrelated evolutionary paths. Uncle Hedgie is a mammal, just like you and me—only he’s been around forty or fifty times longer than we have. I couldn’t help but respect how antediluvian this little thing was, and I came to feel that having Uncle Hedgie living with us on the Ranting Hill was the equivalent of sharing our bathtub with a sturgeon or coelacanth.

If Santa knew Caroline’s heart, she herself knew her mind. She honestly wanted nothing more for Christmas, and having received Uncle Hedgie was entirely thrilled. Unlike most grownups, Caroline always knows what she wants in life; also unlike us, she is satisfied when she gets it. She loves to play with her unique pet—at least, such play as is possible with a cranky pincushion—and she takes excellent care of him. For my part, I like that having a hedgehog around forces me to remember how ridiculously young we humans are as a species, and how few of our current, mostly infantile, behaviors are likely to be sustainable for the next 15 hundred years, let alone 15 million. When Uncle Hedgie looks me in the eye, I detect in his glare an unmistakable message: “Back off, sonny. I’ve been doing my thing since you were in evolutionary short pants.” If, in the impossibly distant future, humans are still around—and can do things like convulse into a perfect ball of spines—then we will have earned the right to cop an attitude of superiority. In the meantime, I’ve decided that Uncle Hedgie has earned not only Caroline’s affection, but my respect.

]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssays2015/02/02 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: An Assay on Old Lang Syne Peakhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/rants-from-the-hill-an-assay-on-old-lang-syne-peak
Taking a right gude willie waught for the turning year.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

Every New Year’s Eve, drunk people from around the world sing some approximation of “Auld Lang Syne,” a song whose words they rarely know—though one of the song’s many strengths is that when arm-in-arm revelers slur out “For hold and sign” or “Fart old Ann Zyne” or “Four old aunts shine” it still sounds damned good. But even when we do know the words we don’t know what they mean. This confusion is forgivable, since “Auld Lang Syne” literally means “old long since” (huh?), and even idiomatic translations like “days gone by” or “long long ago” don’t entirely clarify the situation. As Billy Crystal’s character puts it in the chick flick When Harry Met Sally, “‘Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot?’ Does that mean that we should forget old acquaintances? Or does it mean that if we happened to forget them we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them?”

“Auld Lang Syne” emerged from the great Lowland Scots ballad tradition, but is most closely associated with Robert Burns, who brilliantly recrafted the song as a beautiful poem that was published in 1788. As Scots, including my own kin, emigrated to every corner of the globe, they took this traditional ballad with them. It thus became Scotland’s greatest cultural export—though, in fairness, the competition was haggis, bagpipes, and plaid skirts for men—and is now beloved by inebriated folks the world over. The version of Burns’s poem we sing today is radically simplified, and omits a number of lovely verses which, if sung in the original Scots, would make a decent field sobriety test. My favorite of these is Bobby’s original closing verse:

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!

and gie’s a hand o’ thine!

And we’ll tak’ a right gude willie waught,

for auld lang syne.

On the off chance you’re as confused as a character in When Harry Met Sally, “willie waught” is the world’s most lyrical euphemism for drink. Here, then, is Burns’s poetic celebration of hand clasping and cup raising in memory of times gone by. It is among the oldest gestures known to human culture.

Thinking about this song caused me to wonder if anything in Nevada might be named for it, which led me to discover the existence of Auld Lang Syne Peak, an obscure, 7,400-foot mountain out in the North Central part of the state. I say “obscure” because this mountain lives in a nearly uninhabited stretch of the Great Basin Desert, where it resides amid innumerable other mountains, including much higher ones like Star Peak and Thunder Mountain, nearly 10,000-footers in the nearby Humboldt Range, where Mark Twain went broke chasing silver back in the early 1860s. But it was the name of the peak that drew me, not its lofty elevation, and so I recruited my hiking buddies Steve and Cheryll and we set out for Auld Lang Syne.

A two-hour drive east from our homes in the western Great Basin takes us from Paiute country out into Shoshone country, and eventually we pull off to recaffeinate at Puckerbrush, Nevada, where a dilapidated sign informs us that we are at 4,288 feet in a town whose population is 28. However, no town is in evidence, just a truck stop with road food, strong coffee, pints of liquor, and those kitschy dream catchers, which together comprise four of the five things a long-haul trucker needs (the fifth is available at the PussyCat, down the highway a stretch toward Winnemucca). From Puckerbrush we rattle overland on washboarded BLM roads through open-range ranching country, then past a small placer gold mining operation. I glimpse the feed hopper and rotating grizzly as we wind through the site, past the settling pond, and then upcanyon into the historic Dun Glen mining area, where we park the truck off in the sage and climb out to gear up for our hike.

Founded in 1862, Dun Glen boomed for thirty years before simply vanishing in the early 1890s. All that remains of the miners who sought their wild fortune here are a few broken-down remains of cabins that were hand dug into a hillside above Dun Glen Creek. We explore these remnant structures, admiring the construction of their hand-laid stone foundations, wondering what it might have been like to eke out a life in this remote place 150 years ago. I notice the fractured, bone-colored loop of a teacup’s handle, set carefully on a foundation rock, a reminder that families lived here. Perhaps some, like my own, were brightened by two beautiful little girls, growing up too fast.

A mile or so into the hike we ascend a low ridge from which the desired peak finally comes into view. It is an anticlimactic moment, as the mountain appears to be a low, unimpressive dome, barely worthy of a stroll, let alone 300 miles of driving. I apologize to Cheryll and Steve for dragging them all the way out here for what looks like a mild constitutional.

“Let’s find something else to climb while we’re here, y’all, ‘cause in a half hour Auld Lang Syne will be in our past,” I say.

Our route is up this low ridge, then across the canyon mouth via what looks like an earthen dam but is actually a giant tailings pile. We scramble up a steep, rocky slope, where the detritus of old mining operations is everywhere visible. Here are the collapsed remnants of a tin shed, there a prospect hole made into a mirror by snowmelt. We guess at the vintage of what we find by observing the nature of the junk. Cheryll finds a piece of threaded pipe, which became widely available in the 1880s. Steve notices a few nails with round rather than square heads, an innovation that dates to the invention of wire nails in the early 1890s. We also find shards of old bottles, many of which are sun purpled, an effect produced when the magnesium dioxide-infused clear glass produced during the second half of the nineteenth century is transformed into a lovely hue of lavender by long exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Here on this remote desert mountain we are surrounded by the scattered fragments of auld lang syne.

Even on the steepest pitches we find vertical shafts whose bottoms remain invisible, though the echoes that return when we drop a chunk of quartz into one suggest impressive depth. Soon we stumble upon an actual mine, which we peek into but know better than to enter. For some reason it makes me uncomfortable to think of people up here so long ago, ghosts digging into the earth with their hands. I wonder if they found what they were looking for inside this dark hole, on the flank of this mountain, in the middle of this illimitable expanse of desert. It is the kind of place where it is easy to imagine great dreams being fulfilled, and also easy to imagine them perishing forever.

Climbing above the long-abandoned mine, we begin what turns out to be a surprisingly difficult ascent through the snowy scree, as we separate and begin to traverse obliquely across the north face of a high ridge and toward a narrow saddle that is strung below the peak. Keeping my head down as I cross the steep slope I see plenty of scat. Probably elk, since it appears large, roundish-oval, and less dimpled than mule deer scat tends to be, though this rough terrain and high elevation also make desert bighorn a contender. As I pick my way across the steep face I occasionally go to three-point, using my uphill hand to stabilize my footing as I work my way toward the distant peak. It is on this slippery traverse that my faulty estimation of the wee, half-hour climb becomes palpable, and I suck wind working to achieve the saddle, which appears to recede before me. Pausing to catch my breath, I look up to see that a second mountain has come into view. Behind what I assumed was Auld Lang Syne is a sister peak that is more distant and also higher. It is in fact the further of these twin summits that we’re bound for, and while we’re already quite a few half-hours into this climb, it is apparent that there are plenty more ahead.

Having tackled the long traverse by our independent routes, Steve and Cheryll and I eventually meet up at a rock outcropping on the saddle below the sister summits. I am the last to arrive. We break here for water and trail food, and for the expansive view. While leaning back against a boulder I notice a golden eagle describing perfect circles directly over the crown of What Used to Be Auld Lang Syne Peak, as if signaling that this unnamed summit might yet have some special significance.

“That’s so beautiful,” Cheryll remarks, admiring the eagle’s effortless gyre. “Perfect! You should write about that.”

“A lone eagle, ignited by shattered sunlight, describing perfect circles over the crown of a domed peak, as if signaling that this unnamed summit might yet have some special significance?” I reply. “I can’t write about that. Way too nature writery. Sounds staged. We know this is actually happening, but readers will think it’s horseshit.” Steve, smiling, points silently to a nearby pile of wild mustang dung.

“Well played,” I reply in response to his wordless punch line.

The eagle circles a few more times, counter-clockwise, winding the hands of time backward, and then is gone. Now for the final pitch of the climb. We scramble around the shoulder of What Used to Be Auld Lang Syne Peak onto a rocky bridge between the twin summits, and then start straight up the exposed crown of the mountain. This is the steepest part of the climb but also the shortest, and we soon find ourselves standing together on the peak. Once again I am the last to arrive, and Cheryll greets me with a serenade that she has arranged in order to celebrate the occasion. She’s loaded a melancholy pop version of “Auld Lang Syne” onto her phone, from which she now plays a crooning, heartbreaking take on Bobby Burns’s old gem.

Of course the moment is intended to be ironic, we three self-consciously reveling in the summit climax of a wilderness experience by cranking pop tunes on an iphone. But the genius of this song is that it will brook no irony. While I subscribe firmly to the maxim that “nostalgia ain’t what it used to be,” the Burns ballad belies any hip dismissal of the imaginative power the past wields over our experience of the present. This tune is the world’s greatest anthem to ephemerality, a poignant expression of the desire to check the rush of time, to turn back on the trail, if only for a moment, toward the always lost country of our past.

As I listen to the song’s verse about friends separated by oceans, and by oceans of time, I think of the families who lived here 150 years ago. When the Dun Glen miners scoured these hills, they had to assay what they dug out of the earth. Assay, which in its mining context refers to the testing of ore to determine its quality, is actually a much older word, and one with broader connotations. Since the fourteenth century, an assay has been a “trial, test of quality, test of character.” To assay is to “try, endeavor, strive.” The sister word to assay is essay, whose etymological pedigree also points to the idea of trying, and of trial. An essay is a weighing, an examination, an endeavor. An essay, ever and always, is an attempt.

As the would-be irony of the song is overwhelmed by the genuine emotion it produces, I gaze in all directions from the summit of

Auld Lang Syne Peak. It is wide open country as far as I can see, with alkali and sage playas laid down gracefully between endless waves of snowy mountains, ranges receding one behind the other into this boundless ocean of high desert. In one direction is a lowering storm, settling on a dark range with veiled fingers of rain and snow that reach for the earth; in the other is a basin and range dramatically illuminated by the late afternoon sun as it descends through azure notches in a mat of silver, flat-bottomed clouds. Which is the view of the past, I wonder, and which the future? Time will tell. Until it does, we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne.]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssays2014/12/29 09:55:00 GMT-6ArticleHunting for scorpionshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.22/hunting-for-scorpions
Seeking one of Earth’s most ancient land invertebrates.

Paruroctonus spp. under ultraviolet light.

Donald Quintana

It is true that all scorpions sting, and that all are venomous. It is true that they hide in places where they’re hard to detect, and then ambush their prey — or your foot — in a vicious attack. And, yes, they brutally crush their victims in their pincers, stinging their prey with a paralyzing toxic soup of neurotoxins and enzyme inhibitors before subjecting it to a tissue-dissolving acid spray, after which they coolly slurp up whatever’s left.

On the other hand, they are among the planet’s oldest invertebrates, and they have the substantially redeeming quality of glowing under ultraviolet light.

There has been considerable debate about scorpion luminescence, but the most persuasive explanation is also the most astounding. Although scorpions are well-endowed with eyes –– one pair on top of their cephalothorax (“head-chest”) and another two to five pairs along the front sides of it –– they have lousy eyesight outside the blue-green spectrum. That’s unfortunate, considering that the main hazard of scorpionhood is being spotted in the moonlight by a predatory lizard, snake, rodent or bird, and getting picked off. The best way to avoid this fate is to take cover, but how can the scorpion know whether it is in danger if its eyes are unable to detect the wavelength of light emanating from the moon? Their elegant solution, it appears, has been to evolve a cuticle that is charged with beta-carboline and other luminescent chemicals. When the scorpion’s exoskeleton is struck by moonlight — which, as a reflection of sunlight, contains some of the same UV rays — it glows. In this sense, the scorpion’s entire body functions as an eye, one that is highly sensitive to small amounts of UV light. If a scorpion sees itself luminescing — something it can do only because the wavelength of its luminescence falls within the blue-green spectrum — it knows that it is exposed and must seek cover. Somewhere deep within its 450-million-year-old nogginchest,- the scorpion says to itself: “Dang, my ass is glowing again. Better head for the sagebrush!”

Scorpions’ fabulous luminescence also allows desert- rats like me to traipse around on moonless nights, UV flashlight in hand, searching for them. One night, my buddy, Steve, and I set out just after dusk, knowing that we had only 90 minutes before the rising of the full moon, which would flood the desert with light, set scorpion butts aglow, and send their owners scuttling into hiding. It was a breezy night, which is not ideal for a scorpion search. Scorpions stalk insects by detecting vibrations through sensory organs in the tips of their legs and specialized hairs on their pincers, so wind can disturb their hunting strategy and keep them tucked in their burrows. But we soon discovered scorpions near juniper snags, around sage and bitterbrush, in rice grass, even out on sandy flats between patches of mule’s ears. The scorpions glowed beautifully in otherworldly splashes of bright purple beneath our lights as they tunneled through the darkness.

I am only slightly ashamed to admit that the high point of the evening was encountering a torrid bout of scorpion sex. Steve and I witnessed two scorpions doing what arachnophiles call the promenade à deux, an appropriately French term for the creature’s elaborate, highly ritualized mating “dance.” The male grasps the female’s pedipalps (little mouth claws) in his, and then dances her around looking for a good place to deposit his spermatophore, the sperm packet that she will take into her genital operculum, thus triggering release of the sperm. This courtship dance can also involve “juddering,” in which the scorpions shudder and convulse, and the “cheliceral kiss,” during which the male uses his pincers to hold the female’s pincers in a gesture that looks to me like holding hands.

I have neighbors who say that in years of living out here in the remote high desert they have never seen a scorpion. In 90 minutes of night hiking, Steve and I saw 80 scorpions, each of them glowing with 450 million years of evolutionary good fortune. I find it fascinating that in all this wide, wild, windy desert, nothing glows under UV light but the scorpion. What if we had a flashlight that illuminated only spiders, or snakes, or rodents? What if we could match the stunning diversity of life here with an equally rich mode of perception?

Those who dismiss this Great Basin landscape as “empty” are looking at something that they are unable to see. This desert is emitting its spectacular beauty in a wavelength their eyes have not yet evolved to detect. To call this place barren is simply to admit an inattentiveness that is the perceptual equivalent of blindness.

When I told one of my neighbors about last night’s scorpion safari, he asked, “Where in the world do you find scorpions out here?” I paused before replying. “Everywhere.”

Michael Branch writes Rants from the Hill, a monthly essay series available at hcn.org. He rants from a remote hilltop in the Great Basin Desert of western Nevada.

]]>No publisherEssaysWildlifeNevadaNot on homepage2014/12/22 04:05:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: Desert Insomniahttp://www.hcn.org/articles/rants-from-the-hill-desert-insomnia
Living the not-so-quiet life in the rural West.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

I don’t recall exactly what I was thinking when I decided it was a good idea to move out to this isolated hilltop in a remote area of the high desert, but surely it must have had something to do with a desire for quiet. (We writers, who talk incessantly and insist that people listen to us, are famously enamored of silence.) No less an expert on pastoral silence than Billy Wordsworth wrote that “with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things,” and so I had been persuaded that true insight must be correlated with harmonious silence. If I could get away from the relentless din of humanity—so little of which has substantial or lasting value—I too might gain the power to see into the beauty of this Great Basin landscape, and the strange and amazing life we live within it.

Of course when we first came out here we didn’t have kids, and I now realize that when one is a parent there is no refuge from the incessant torrent of noise that we both produce and are subjected to. Trying to parent and have quiet is like trying to swim without getting wet. It isn’t only my daughters’ talking that breaks the silence around here, it is also their regrettable habit of waking throughout the night and feeling obliged to come tell me all about it. The other night Caroline, our eight-year-old, marched into our bedroom at 1:45 a.m. and blurted out, “Do you think if you crossed a camel with a monkey it could go without water and still climb trees?” I replied as any exhausted parent would. “Do you need to know the answer tonight, honey, or can I give that one some thought?” Hannah, our eleven-year-old, is even worse, because she breaks the silence in a creepier way: she sleepwalks. A week ago she zombied her way into our room at 2:30 a.m. to ask—in that eerie, flat affect of the somnambulist—why we had decided to turn our home into a seafood restaurant and had forced her to become a waitress, thus ruining the birthday party she had planned for her BFF, Taylor Swift. In our family, apparently even being asleep isn’t a good enough reason to stop talking.

In addition to these human distractions, my quiet is routinely disrupted by our worthless pets. My wife Eryn’s cat, Buster Posey, has a meow as loud as a barking dog, and frequently celebrates the witching hour by using my temple as his ass throne. My dog is worse. Beauregard not only has long, floppy ears, but also huge jowls, which gives him a ponderous, mint-julepy sort of look. But it is the acoustic force of his ears and lips that is most astounding. Whenever he shakes his head, which he does each time I’m about to enter deep sleep, there is a prodigious flapping, a sound so rhythmic, resonant, and loud that it sounds uncannily like the beating of helicopter blades. It is as if a Huey were landing at the foot of the bed, only it is a chopper that also strafes saliva up the walls in a uniform splatter pattern. Even when Beau is silent, which is rare, he is still deadly. His flatulence is so unspeakably toxic that when awakened by it I find myself wishing he would shake his head some more, just to fan the stink away with his billowing lips.

All these disruptions to my quiet occur within the house, but it is outside that the real acoustic trouble originates. Mice scurry along the window sills and frequently succeed in gaining access to the walls. Once they’ve breached the levee of the stucco exterior—which they can do through a gap as small as a quarter of an inch—they delight in using their little claws and teeth to scratch away at the drywall, which acts as a drumhead, amplifying the scraping sounds so that, as I lie in bed wide awake, I estimate the average mouse’s weight at seventy pounds. Worse are the packrats, gifted climbers that, in the absence of a handy cliff, scramble straight up the exterior of the house, where they gnaw away at the soffits all night in an attempt to enter the attic.

But if the rodents are small, the wind out here is huge, ripping down from the Sierra in winter, and blasting up from the desert canyons as the Washoe Zephyr in summer. It isn’t simply the unrelenting howling that is disconcerting, but also the associated effects of the big wind. Some of these are predictable: flying tumble mustard plants bouncing off the windows, or the familiar sound of our deck furniture first sliding along, and then tumbling out into the desert. But there are also weirder effects of the big wind. For example, once I’m awakened by the violent creaking and whistling of the gusts I sometimes stumble to the bathroom, where I stand above the toilet watching the water rock back and forth in the bowl; especially by moonlight, this gives me the peculiar feeling that I’m trying to take a leak from the deck of a pitching ship, where even the can is a moving target.

California Valley Coyote, photograph courtesy of Flickr user Justin.

It isn’t only the wind that howls, but also the coyotes. What could be more romantic than coyote song at night? Western nature writers croon about the experience of hearing the pack, a transformative moment in which one is apparently obliged to feel an overwhelming spiritual bond with the nonhuman world. I, instead, nurture a deep bond with the fantasy of someday getting five hours of sleep. Coyote song is not as advertised in the movies. Their chorus, if we want to stretch a valorizing metaphor so far as to use that term, is less a sonorous howling than a chaotic cacophony of yips and yelps. I’ll go with chorus only if I may stipulate that it is a chorus of inebriated kindergarteners. These selfish animals also refuse to yelp on my schedule, instead taking special pleasure in busting loose just about the time I’ve finally rid myself of sleeptalking daughters and farting dogs.

Old man coyote isn’t alone out there. There are also the great horned owls, which, like the coyotes, do not often produce the pastoral night song we have been led to expect. Gentle hooting? Forget it. The signature, charismatic Hollywood hoot comprises about a fifth of their repertoire, while the remainder is a dissonant amalgamation of cries, whistles, shrieks, barks, and hisses. And may I be wrapped in rattlers if an immature owl doesn’t sound like a human baby screeching in agony because its little leg has been caught in the teeth of a combine. We aren’t talking about a sound that shatters silence, but rather one that splinters sanity.

Last Sunday this immense desert night provided me with an unremitting sonic parade, a noisy nocturne in which the usual annoyances occurred serially over the course of what might otherwise have been a decent night’s sleep. Sleeptalking kid, face-sitting cat, lip flapping dog, scurrying mice, gnawing packrats, surging wind, yipping coyotes, shrieking owls. Then, at 3:45 a.m., our chickens started clucking and squawking. Yet another of my ill-advised pastoral affectations, these hens are almost as worthless as our pets. We feed them, clean their coop, keep them watered and warm, and generally enable their selfish, indolent lifestyle. They, in return, sometimes appear to perhaps be nearing the contemplation of maybe almost laying an egg, but then rarely follow through. Now, in addition to being unproductive, smelly, high-maintenance, and lazy, they were also being loud.

In a moment of pure frustration I succumbed to that special kind of exhausted anger that arises when a desperate need for rest has been thwarted one too many times. In this odd moment some biological imperative exerted itself, as a deeply buried survival instinct eclipsed my last shred of equanimity and convinced me that sleep was worth fighting for and, if necessary, worth dying for. Enough was enough. If the chickens were blathering of their own accord, I intended to shut them up—for good, if necessary. If it was instead Old Man Coyote who was riling up the birds, then I intended to holler until I drove him a mile into the sagebrush ocean, where his racket could be drowned out by wind ripping through bitterbrush. Jumping out of bed I grabbed the handle of my big, yellow flashlight, and stomped angrily out into the desert wearing only boxer shorts (lime green, with bright red ladybugs). “Shut up!” I shouted into the night. “All y’all chickens, coyotes, owls, zip it! I moved out here to get some damned peace and quiet! Shut . . . the . . . hell . . . UP!”

As I cursed into the darkness, the darting beam of my flashlight caught a reflection in the sage. I now swung the beam back and panned slowly from right to left in search of whatever glint the light had caught. Suddenly I froze as the beam locked on two greenish-yellow lights that appeared to beam back at me. They were low in the sage—far too low to be the eyes of Old Man Coyote. They were also too far apart to be coyote, and in the penumbra of light glowing through the sage I could now make out the large, rounded face of a big cat.

I’m not afraid of rattlers or scorpions. I’m not even afraid of bears, which are scarce as hen’s eggs around here in any case. But I am afraid of mountain lions, whose mule deer kills I’ve found atop my home mountain, and whose immense paw prints I discover left like hieroglyphics in the hardened caliche mud out on the flats near the canyon spring. As I stood barefoot and paralyzed, with the wind ripping through my boxers, I suddenly had a profound sense of exactly what sort of mistake I had just made. Not only was I unarmed, nearly naked, away from the house, and twenty feet from the eyes of a big cat that was not budging an inch, but I had just screamed at the King of the High Desert Hills to shut the hell up. I had a momentary worry that in addition to being killed I’d also be featured in the Darwin Awards: “A Nevada man walked up to a mountain lion in the middle of the night in a remote area of the high desert and shouted at the big cat to ‘shut the hell up’. The cat responded by attacking the man, killing him quickly with a vicious bite to the neck. The kill was silent, an irony the man did not live long enough to appreciate.” I imagined what I myself would say had I read this entry in the Darwin Awards. “Hey, check it out. This guy was so mad about noise that he yelled—and loud enough to be killed by the quietest animal in the West. Totally got what he deserved. What a dumb ass!”

Trying not to focus on the comic potential of my looming death, I began to back away slowly, keeping the flashlight beam locked on those silent eyes, expecting every moment that the big cat would be upon me. But those greenish-yellow lasers remained unblinking, and after what seemed like forever I backed into the door, turned the knob behind my back while keeping those glowing eyes in sight, and eased into the house. Shutting the door quietly, I made several resolutions instantly. First, I would never, ever go outside again. Second, I would let my wife’s cat out immediately. Third, I would change my boxers as soon as possible. And, fourth, I would snap on the exterior light in hopes of spotting the cat. I quickly hit the switch and pressed my face to the window. Slowly, calmly, out from the sagebrush walked a huge . . . bobcat.

Bobcat, photograph courtesy Flickr user Valerie, ucumari photography.

Because bobcats can have a home range of over 100 miles, and are elusive and retiring under any circumstances, the odds of getting a good look at one are vanishingly slim, even for a wild desert hillbilly like me. In a decade living on the Ranting Hill—and walking around 13,000 miles in the hills, canyons, and playas out here—I’ve had only a single glimpse of Lynx rufus. Now, out of nowhere, came this desert ghost, strutting to center stage on a well-lit catwalk of its own. The bobcat strode gracefully across the desert flat beside our house and walked calmly beneath the girls’ swing set. I was surprised at how long and cheetah-like its front legs appeared. The rear haunches were muscular and powerful, an adaptation for pouncing, if not on Darwin Award winners, then on big jackrabbits. The coloration of the thick fur was spectacular, a wild combination of bars, dots, and bowed splotches that helped the animal remain invisible among the dappled sage.

Before the bobcat receded into the darkness beyond the reach of the porch light it stopped just once, momentarily turning its head in my direction. Its face was beautiful, unmistakably lynx-like, with upright, black-tipped ears, and bright eyes, while the broad, curved flair of its whiskered cheeks made its head appear impossibly large. And then it was gone. Although it was only 4:00 a.m. I made myself a mug of strong java, and sat in silence—at last, silence—looking out into the inky darkness, already treasuring the memory of the best night of sleep I never had.

]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssaysNevadaDeserts2014/12/01 09:50:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: What’s Drier than David Sedaris?http://www.hcn.org/articles/rants-from-the-hill-whats-drier-than-david-sedaris
The Ranter Defends Both Nevadans and Count Chocula.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

Like me, David Sedaris is a literary humorist. Unlike me, he has sold around eight million copies of his books, which have been translated into twenty-five languages. (Several of my essays have been translated into Estonian; I may not be big in Japan, but the Estonians find me hilarious.) As any insanely jealous fellow writer would, I’ve been busy finding reasons (which my wife, Eryn, unkindly refers to as excuses) why Sedaris has been a bit more successful than I have. Why do I reckon Sedaris is outselling me? Well, he publishes in The New Yorker and I publish in High Country News (no offense, HCN editors). He writes from an estate in England, and I write from a remote hilltop in the Great Basin Desert. His neighbors are intelligent, cultured, literate people with beaucoup leisure time and disposable income. My neighbors are less interested in a good laugh than you might think. This is because they are primarily scorpions, rattlers, and libertarian survivalists—the latter of which can be dangerous.

An actual incident involving David Sedaris visiting my hometown bolsters my theory, while also supporting my corollary assumption that Sedaris, who must certainly be fearful of competition from me, is out to discredit those of us here in the rural, intermountain West. It all started after Sedaris did a reading in nearby Reno last year while on a 60-city tour to promote his book Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls. Soon after his stop here in northern Nevada, Sedaris appeared on The Daily Show, where host Jon Stewart inquired about the many cities he was visiting. “Which one did you hate the most?” quipped the host. Sedaris replied with a story about his observations at a recent reading in Reno. The humorist observed wryly that “the icebreaking question when I was signing books was ‘Why did you choose that t-shirt?’” He went on to criticize the Nevadans’ attire, which he claimed included sweatpants and cut-off shorts. The punch line of the anecdote concerned a woman in her sixties who approached Sedaris to have her book signed. “Is that your good Count Chocula t-shirt?” Sedaris asked the woman. “I didn’t think anyone was going to notice,” she replied. The anecdote was masterfully calculated and timed, and Sedaris had Stewart and his New York City audience in stitches. So that’s the story. It made the usual cyber-rounds and was soon enjoyed by folks across the nation.

Of course I’m no stranger to Reno bashing. After all, I’m the guy who wrote a whole essay about my hometown being trashed by the damned Muppets. You know you’ve hit bottom when not only David Sedaris but also Fozzie, the ursine standup comic, sees your town only as material. I generally subscribe to the principle that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but the Sedaris in Nevada incident went largely without scrutiny, and so I feel the need to examine it more closely.

First, let me say that I do not intend to blame Sedaris for stooping so low to get a cheap laugh, since this is something I do at every possible opportunity. Second, I have no interest in defending the informal dress of Nevadans, because it strains my imagination to think of anything less interesting or important. Finally, I certainly won’t spill any ink speculating about the veracity of Sedaris’s anecdote, because, as a humorist myself, I know very well that whether or not any of this actually occurred is immaterial.

No, my objections are different than you might suspect. The first is that I believe a person should know what the hell they’re talking about when they make fun of something. As a single example, consider this Robin Williams gem: “Do you think God gets stoned? I think so. Look at the platypus.” If you know that the duck-billed platypus is an ovoviviparous (egg-laying) mammal—that is to say, a total oddball in the animal kingdom—then this joke will be funny (even if you aren’t stoned). Williams knows of what he speaks. Sedaris, on the other hand, clearly doesn’t know Reno from his other 59 whistle stops. Exhibit A: in chatting with Stewart he doesn’t even pronounce the name of our state correctly (its NevAda, not NevAHda).

Equally egregious, the wag who offers this comic excoriation of how we dress has chosen for his national television appearance thick horned-rim glasses that make him look uncannily like that cartoon dog, Mr. Peabody, a shirt in a bright pink reminiscent of cotton candy, a tie the color of dung, and, as the pièce de résistance, black dress shoes worn with white socks. Seriously? Sweatpants would have been a clear improvement on this get-up. Apparently, however, the outfit is to Jon Stewart’s taste. “You look terrific,” he tells the humorist. “Very nice suit.” Sure, so long as it’s Halloween and you’re costumed as a pseudo-intellectual Woody Allen. Stewart’s acumen is on further display when Sedaris describes folks at the event wearing cut-offs. “Was it a particularly hot and humid environment?” asks Stewart, without a whiff of irony. I went to college with Jon, and he’s the smartest funny person (or funniest smart person) I’ve ever met. And the way it’s going out there, I couldn’t stomach the real news without his brilliant satirical news to coat the pill. That said, humid in Nevada? He was never that daft around our freshman dorm.

Even if I could get past the idea that a comic, of all people, would be so pompous as to imagine there should be a dress code at his gigs, I’m still deeply insulted on behalf of the truly innocent victim in this story: Count Chocula. In this Halloween season, it seems only right that I should stand up for this maligned hero. General Mills debuted Count Chocula, Franken-Berry, and Boo-Berry (the “Monster Cereals”) back in 1971, which put me at just the right age to love them, and to join the ranks of kids who experienced a condition actually called “Franken-Berry Stool,” in which the heavy red dyes in the strawberry-flavored cereal turned our feces the color of David Sedaris’s shirt, when they would under normal circumstances have been the color of his tie.

For those of you too young to remember, 1971 was none too placid a year. The Charles Manson murder trial was nightly news, Ku Klux Klansman were arrested for bombing school buses, Lt. William Calley was found guilty of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and the Nixon administration arrested 13,000 anti-war protestors during a single three-day period. Closer to home, Operation Grommet proceeded apace, as the United States spent the year continuing a decades-long program of attacking Nevada (which they probably pronounced NevAHda) with nuclear weapons, the fallout from which caused obscenely high cancer rates among downwinders. It was a moment in which some unnamable innocence was being lost, which is another way of saying that we needed Count Chocula. TV commercials even reassured our parents that the cereal was “So full of nutrients, it’s scary!” Not as scary as the A-bomb, or even the fuchsia poop induced by Franken-Berry, but you get the point.

As for the count himself, he could hardly have been less frightening. He was, in fact, a sweet little vampire, with his single fang (like a kid who had lost one of his front baby teeth), huge doe eyes, comically pointy ears, long puppet nose, and friendly, silly grin. (Actually, I note a sight resemblance to Sedaris.) One of the unique personality traits of the cartoon vampire was that, although he had the power to scare the other cereal monsters in his posse, he was terrified whenever he came face to face with “such scary beings as mice and children.” Yes, you heard that right. We, children in an age of fear, had the power to scare a vampire! It was a delicious feeling, knowing that we could turn the tables on terror simply by lifting our spoons.

Now that I’m a father, the proposition that children are more terrifying than vampires seems obvious enough. Each fall, when the monster cereals are sold for just two months leading up to Halloween, I become unapologetically nostalgic. The fact that the cereals have been successfully re-released in special edition retro boxes suggests that I’m not alone in this. Count Chocula? Come on, Sedaris. He’s one of the good guys.

So here’s a summary of how the notorious incident with David Sedaris and the Reno t-shirt lady appeared to the national audience of The Daily Show: Sedaris hilariously satirizes Nevadans’ attire, building to a punch line in which the sixty-something t-shirt lady, who is comically exposed as ignorant and provincial, becomes the butt of the joke. Indeed, she is figured as doubly stupid, first for wearing the shirt and then for failing to realize that the humorist’s joke is at her expense.

Here, instead, is how I characterize the incident. While dressed like a cross between a New Yorker editor and an inebriated birthday party clown, a comic who is raking large coin in our community mispronounces the name of our state on national TV while failing to answer Jon Stewart’s inane query as to whether it is unusually humid in the high desert. Finding it amusing to insult an older woman who has paid to see his show, purchased his book, and waited in line to meet him, he delivers a sarcastic crack about a t-shirt bearing the image of sweet old Count Chocula, whom anyone who was a kid in 1971 would now support for president.

The author, taking a well-deserved rest after ranting about David Sedaris.

As a humorist myself—which is to say, as a person for whom irreverence must be understood as my stock-in-trade—I don’t have a problem with any of that. But here’s what chaps my hide. Sedaris fails to realize that it is not he but rather the woman who delivers the punch line, of which Sedaris himself is the butt. “I didn’t think anyone was going to notice,” she replies, without missing a beat. The irony in this exchange belongs not to the humorist for observing the idiosyncrasy of the woman’s informal attire. It belongs instead to the woman, who knows perfectly well what Sedaris is doing and bests him by turning the joke around with the kind of graceful, self-deprecating irony that is the hallmark of genuine wit. (And can there be any doubt that she is a person of good humor if she has chosen to wear her Chocula colors to a performing arts center?) Any desert rat will tell you that this brand of dry humor is a signature characteristic of those of us who dwell in this dry place.

Sedaris is right that this is an amusing anecdote. He’s simply wrong about why. So I hope one of you reading this will drop him a line to let him know that black socks go with black shoes, and to teach him how to pronounce Nevada. (You might also ask him to let Jon know that Nevada is the driest state in the union.) Most important, please tell David Sedaris—whom I consider the most gifted literary humorist working today—that it is we who consider him the unwitting provincial. You think The New Yorker has cornered the market on irony? Out here in the desert our irony is so damned dry that it’s scary. Bluh! Bluh! Bwaa haah haah!

]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssaysNevada2014/11/03 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: How to Cuss in Westernhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/rants-from-the-hill-how-to-cuss-in-western
When “Airin’ the Lungs” is registered at the swear jar.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

A few days ago I was in conversation with a friend when, as is my habit, I casually described a prominent local politician as chickenshit, while also characterizing this representative’s self-important, disingenuous prattle as horseshit. To my surprise, my buddy looked at me quizzically and requested a clarification of the distinction between the shit of a chicken and that of a horse. This struck me as a low point in the history of human communication. After all, it ought to be immediately apparent that horseshit is bullshit, while chickenshit, a different matter entirely, is moral cowardice. What had become of our ability to curse effectively, let alone colorfully? If we can’t communicate through the use of profanity, I wondered, what the hell is left? Sonnets?

That evening over a tumbler of rye I decried the profound illiteracy of my well-meaning friend, whose lexicon of fecal euphemisms was so tragically impoverished. My wife Eryn, instead of supporting me as a good life partner should, instead turned the tables by suggesting that I curse too much. “Are you shitting me?” I asked in shocked reply. “I’m a writer, honey. I invoke profanity only when driven to it by an absolute need for precision.” At this point our owl-eared young daughters joined the conversation from down the hall, affirming loudly that, in fact, “Dad cusses way too much!” My further protestations precipitated the girls’ suggestion that we set up a “swear jar,” the proceeds of which we agreed to donate to Animal Arc, our local wildlife rehabilitation center. “Fine,” I replied. “Name your price. And prepare to break the bad news to that crippled sow bear that she’ll have to suck her paws this winter, because they won’t be able to buy her a dam . . . a damp apple with what I’ll be putting in that jar. Poor thing. She loves damp apples, too.” It was soon decided that each swear word would require a fifty-cent contribution from whomever should so utterly lack self-control as to let one slip.

I learned a lot in that first week of living with the swear jar. The first thing I learned is that I have absolutely no verbal self-control and that my reliance on profanity is not only excessive but perfectly astonishingly. It soon became clear that the contents of the swear jar were on pace to eclipse the girls’ college savings, and that was without a single contribution from anyone else in the family. Worse, I learned that it was impossible for me to pay only fifty cents per curse, because immediately upon swearing I would recognize my error, which would, of course, cause me to swear. So it was a one-buck minimum every time I slipped, which occurred approximately every ninety seconds of each waking hour. And, by the way, I’m an insomniac.

I like to think of myself as a New West kind of guy, but all this regulation and penalizing of what I view as an essential mode of self-expression caused me to wonder what the tradition of profanity in the Old West might have been. It turns out that the pedigree of swearing in the West—and such swearing was once referred to with the beautiful phrase airin’ the lungs—is in fact quite distinguished. Profanity, slang, vernacular, and hyperbole were once woven deeply into the fabric of western life and manners. In fact, many of the flamboyant expressions pioneered by early cowboys, miners, and gamblers are still part of our American vocabulary. We all know what it means to be a bad egg, or to be bamboozled, or to have a bee in your bonnet. And even if we’ve forgotten the difference between chickenshit and horseshit, we remember what it means to be buffaloed, to be in cahoots, or to get something done by hook or by crook. After all, if you don’t cool your heels you might end up dead as a doornail. You may have a hard row to hoe (note to Millennials: row not road), but if you have a mind to pony up instead of being a skinflint and making tracks you might end up with enough coin to shake a stick at instead of winding up tuckered out and mad as a hornet. Gold miners taught us that although we all want to hit pay dirt, not everything we attempt in life will pan out. Cowboys reminded us to first hold our horses and then to strike while the iron is hot. Trail cooks suggested, none too politely, that we should quit our bellyaching. Sheepherders helped us see what it means to be on the fence or dyed in the wool; they also made stories into yarns, which they spun, sometimes in order to fleece the listener. As a writer and a certified curmudgeon, I especially appreciate that early printers expressed the feeling of being out of sorts—a term that refers to the grouchy mood brought on when a printer runs out of letters while setting type.

Of course it might be just as well that we’ve let a few of these old sayings fade into trail dust. It is perhaps wise that we no longer refer to facing a difficult undertaking as having big nuts to crack. All in all, though, we’ve lost more than we’ve gained. I wish we still referred to procrastination as beating the devil around the stump. I’d like to be able to say, when I’m in hurry, that I’m about to mizzle, burn the breeze, spudgel, light a shuck, marble, cut dirt, put my licks in, or, best of all, absquatulate. And why should I apologize for having forgotten something when I might instead say that I disremembered it—a term that is more honest, since my selective memory is actually a subversive form of passive resistance. For example, I seem routinely to disremember my children’s elementary school talent shows—where, if I were so unfortunate as to remember them, I would be subjected to an interminable lineup of kids breathlessly shrieking out Taylor Swift songs in voices that could worm a sheep.

As I began to lamp that if I didn’t mend my ways and hobble my latchpan I was going to be in for it, I fetched up on the idea of just blathering western all the time. (Translation: Observing that if I didn’t change for the better and be quiet I would get into trouble, I decided to speak in western slang constantly.) That way I could say exactly what I wanted to, do it forcefully and colorfully, and not have to arrange for direct deposit of my paycheck to the damned swear jar.

My first idea was to cuss out my boss, just to catch the weasel asleep and acknowledge the corn (surprise him by speaking the truth about his shortcomings). I’ll swear an oath that this big bug is crooked as a Virginia fence (testify that this self-important oaf is corrupt); truth told, the scoundrel could swallow a bag of nails and cough up corkscrews. He’s so weak north of his ears that he couldn’t hit the ground with his hat in three throws, so ugly he’d make a freight train take a wagon trail, and so mean he’d steal a fly from a blind spider. So I swaggered into his office and set to frumping him for a shanny (began mocking him as a fool). “Bill,” says I, “you’re a no count flannel mouth chiseling chuckleheaded gadabout coffee boiler (no good, smooth-talking, dishonest, ignorant, jawflapping, lazy ass), and if you reckon you can fob me out of my oof with your rumbumptiousmonkey shines, then you’ve got the wrong pig by the tail. (If you think you can con me out of my money with your pompous tricks, you’ve picked the wrong guy to mess with). I’m reverent as a kedgegully washer and death onslimsey, rag-properedlickfingers like you. (I’m powerful as a big storm and dangerous to feeble, overdressed ass kissers like you. And here I pause to editorialize that lickfinger is the greatest euphemism for obsequiousness ever invented.) I’ll go at you hammer and tongs and exfluncticate you all to flinders until you plainhang up your fiddle. (Reader, you’ve got this one, right?). Well, Bill was not only difficulted by my sayings, but downright funkified, so I just sidled out of his office with a satisfied squinny. (He was both perplexed and scared—yes, funkified means scared!—by what I said, so I walked coolly away with a satisfied chuckle.)

Well, I was feeling above snakes from getting the drop on my boss with my pink westernized lingo, so I trampoosedtwo whoops and a holler over to the watering hole to check my capitalbar dog. (Happy at having insulted my boss with my brilliant regional vernacular, I strolled to the nearby bar to see my preferred bartender). “Dondo,” says I, bustin’ through the swinging doors of the Risky Biscuit Saloon, “you know plain right that I’m a dabsterlapper (know very well that I’m an expert drinker), and that I’m here to get corned (tipsy), fuddled (slightly drunk), slewed (moderately drunk), whittled (quite drunk) and, directly, full as a tick (very drunk). Bend my elbow, partner! Set me up (pour me) some of that anti-fogmatic (whiskey), tanglefoot (whiskey), and snake poison (whiskey), and bust out some bumblebee (whiskey), clinch mountain (whiskey), and coffin varnish (whiskey) to boot! I’m going whole hog (all the way) to paint my tonsils (drink) until I’m roostered (extremely drunk) and snapped (thoroughly drunk), so spread out a general treat (a free round) of pop skull (whiskey), jack of diamonds (whiskey), prairie dew (whiskey), and rebel soldier (whiskey) for these here lushingtons (fellow drinkers). Set up red eye (whiskey), bottled courage (whiskey), rookus juice (whiskey), and oh-be-joyful (whiskey) for every last poke down therail (man at the bar). Now, Dondo, go at it like you’re killing rattlers (energetically)! Crate up the sheepherder’s delight and tarantula juice (put away the cheap whiskey) and bust out some dynamite (whiskey) and neck oil (whiskey). You know I won’t shoot the crow (leave the saloon without paying), so put up the washystingo (weak beer) and get the scamper juice (whiskey) and family disturbance (whiskey) flowing! Liquor me onsheep dip (pour me whiskey) until I’ve a brick in my hat (am unthinkably drunk) and I wake with roaring case of barrel fever (a massive hangover)!

The Jersey Lily in Ingomar, Montana. By Flickr user akahawkeyefan.

Well, I carried on in that style of blusteration for twenty minutes, until I had used up all fifty-six of the westernisms for whiskey that I’d recently learned. When I was finally through, Dondo just handed me a cup of black coffee—and his hoothouse blackwater, by the way, could float a pony—and then he phoned Eryn to ask her to come pick me up.

The down side of my experiment with talking western was that not even my family—or, more importantly, my bartender—could understand a word I was saying. The up side was that I was able to air my lungs without being fired, or even having to pay into the swear jar. In fact, I soon took up a more formal approach to western cussing, adopting such stock terms as crimany, jiminy, pshal, and I vum. But my favorite curse, one that is absolutely authentic to the Old West, and to which my own identity drew me magnetically, is I Dad! I don’t know what it means, but I know from experience that it’s true. Sure, I cuss too much. Sure, I’m ornery as a cross-eyed mule. But even with all my flaws, I Dad! Even my children agree.

I reckon by this point I’ve more or less gone to seed. Certain I’ve been out in the high desert so long I know the lizards by their first names. And maybe Eryn is right that I should drop the wonderful expression hot as a whorehouse on nickel night from this Rant. But right there it is anyways, because I don’t cotton to buckling under when it comes to hammering outace high literary art. Until the day I cash in and get planted in the bone orchard, I’m going to keep after being a scrappingslang whanger who goesacross lots to string a whizzer for you. And if I do swack up a stretchernow and again, I’ll ride a longslipe to be a buster who’s a huckleberry above a persimmon. And that, pardner, ain’t no horseshit.

]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssays2014/10/06 04:05:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: The Bucket Listhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/rants-from-the-hill-the-bucket-list
When making a to-do list is the most important thing on your to-do list.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

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“Death is nature’s way of saying ‘your table is ready.’” –Robin Williams

A recent study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry was resurrected in the tabloids after it suggested that successful comedians often show characteristics typically found in folks suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. A scientifically demonstrable link between humor and insanity had momentarily captured the feeble imagination of a public that likes to think of comedy as a form of divine madness, and so rushed to embrace the dubious proposition that the wise fools who produce it are necessarily both troubled and gifted. Apparently this isn’t the same public that attends Hollywood comedies, which consist primarily of fart jokes aimed at a core demographic of fourteen-year-old boys. So poor is the comic fare at the Cineplex (which itself sounds like an incurable disease) that even I, an aficionado of flatulence humor, have thrown in the towel. We’ve simply come too far from the quality fart jokes of Shakespeare. (In Othello the musician asks the clown “Whereby hangs a tail, sir?” to which the clown replies “by many a wind instrument that I know.”)

In response to the immoderate public affection for this study, comedienne Sara Pascoe wrote a brilliant reply in The Guardian. In it, she flatly points out that being a humorist is a job, and that some people succeed at it because they work hard. Comedy, she observes, is a craft, a practice, a skill, and, often, a grind. (Here I’m reminded of Mark Twain, who complained in a letter that “for seven weeks I have not had my natural rest but have been a night-and-day sick-nurse to my wife . . . and yet must turn in now and write a damned humorous article.”) Well, this was a pretty unheroic gloss, what with its total absence of insanity and genius and all. Pascoe is absolutely right, but that didn’t change the fact that, as a humorist myself, I wasn’t keen on her outing us as she did. After all, who wants to be told that something that is supposed to make them laugh actually took a long time to create and was terribly hard work? If people prefer to see industrious, workmanlike humorists as insane geniuses, I don’t see a decent reason to mess that up. Always better to be funny than right.

One of Pascoe’s observations, however, caught my attention. Commenting that the creativity of the humorist “allows a much more childlike approach to life,” she goes on to say that if the researchers had administered their test to children, instead of to 523 professional comedians (how did they find so many?), the kids would “all be hugely ‘psychotic’ in their thinking.” As a parent, I found this assertion that children are universally insane more interesting—and also considerably more accurate—than the claim that humor is a natural byproduct of psychopathology.

I had a chance to test this proposition recently, when my two young daughters decided, for no reason whatsoever, that everybody in our family should produce a bucket list. Now, I had long intended to make a bucket list, but had been kept from it by the most obvious impediment: thinking about what you want to do before you die means thinking about dying, which is even less entertaining than a Hollywood fart joke. My wife, Eryn, claims that I have “mortality issues,” which is accurate only if preferring life to death constitutes an “issue.” (I’m from the Woody Allen school on this one: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” wrote Allen, “I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”) Still, it wasn’t easy to say no to the girls, so we all agreed to work on our personal bucket lists.

Hannah and Caroline had so much fun with their project that by the next day they had posted their two lists—with a combined total of over 150 entries—on the outside of their bedroom door. In this same time I had constructed a bucket list that consisted, literally, of a single entry: “Make a bucket list.” In fairness, I’m not a very expeditious list maker, even when the topic is more pleasant than “Stuff I need to get done quickly in case I die.” After all, it took me two decades to complete my “List of Things That Actually Work,” which includes only WD-40, bourbon, and Moby-Dick. Still, the girls had good reason to complain that I didn’t seem to be working very hard on my list. Their lists were not only completed (and decorated!) but publicly posted, like Martin Luther’s theses on the church door, while I had only my one, sad little entry. It didn’t help that my list, such as it was, was scribbled in shop pencil on the back of a liquor store receipt.

Needing to divert the focus away from my own failure, I decided to take a good, close look at the girls’ bucket lists. After all, how could they have produced anything decent in such a short time? As I read through their lists, though, I was impressed not only by the range and creativity of what Hannah and Caroline had come up with, but also by their uninhibited spontaneity and originality. As Pascoe might have predicted, the lists did look like they had been made by crazy people—but by imaginative, caring, crazy people who recognize no limits to what is possible.

I examined eleven-year-old Hannah’s list first. It contained a lot of adventures that I wish I had thought to put on my own list, including “hang glide,” “make an album of my own cool music,” “play basketball in the snow,” and “be an extra in a movie.” But along with these proposed escapades were some items whose beauty was in their everyday nature: “fill a jar with buttons,” “babysit for somebody other than my sister,” “go a week without making my bed,” “finish a book in a day.” There was also a good bit more philanthropy than my own unwritten list is likely to have contained. Hannah wanted to “feed homeless people,” “read stories at a senior home,” and “help poor children,” all of which made my own life’s goals—which, if I could ever articulate them, would include “drink expensive rye,” “cuss out my boss,” and “heckle more at baseball games”—seem selfish and ill-conceived. Hannah’s list showed a desire to travel, but while she included visits to Canada, London, and New Orleans, she also listed “ride my bike in California” (not very exotic, since California is just a few miles away).

And I was struck that Hannah’s list contained items that were easy as pie right along with things that were pie in the sky. “Participate in a pie eating contest,” for example, appeared just a few entries away from “become a famous inventor.” “Build a big snowman” was right next to “meet the president.” I also noticed that the desert figured prominently in her list. “Own a rattlesnake,” “hike up the canyon to watch the moon rise,” and “sing a concert for the coyotes” were among the things she hopes to accomplish. Hannah’s bucket list also expressed an urge to bring delight to others. She wanted to “count how many people I can make smile” and “get a whole room of people laughing.”

Seven-year-old Caroline’s list was, if anything, even more interesting. Like her big sister’s bucket list, Caroline’s oscillated wildly from the mundane to the fantastic. “Get a white cat” was number 42 on her list; number 43 was “be an astronaut.” “Dye rocks” was immediately next to “climb the Eiffel Tower” and “have a pet hamster” was adjacent to “ride a shark” (there was a lot of animal riding on her list: shark, seal, jaguar, kangaroo, and giraffe). “Work at a pool” was immediately preceded by “touch the moon.” “Eat cake with my hands” was not far from “carve a giant totem pole.” Also like Hannah, little sister had constructed a list that was animated by a genuine philanthropic sentiment. While Caroline wanted to “own a hundred year old mansion” she also wanted to “own an orphanage and give kids ice cream every day.” And in addition to planning to “give flowers to a stranger” she also expressed the more disturbing ambition to “have a big sleepover with random people off the street.”

Given Caroline’s personality, I should have guessed that she wants to “climb a volcano,” “make a world record,” and “form a band called the ‘Fire Breathing Unicorns.’” But she also has some simple dreams: to “use a walkie talkie,” “have a tug-o-war over a mud pit,” and “dance in the rain.” And, like her sister, many of Caroline’s life goals are linked to her home desert. She wants to “go pan for gold,” “find the end of a desert rainbow,” and, for some reason, “eat a kangaroo rat.” She also plans to “mountain bike across Spain, Thailand, and Massachusetts.” My favorite entry on her list was “dream about visiting a beautiful island.” When I asked why she thought it would be so wonderful to visit an island she corrected me, emphatically: “No, Dad, dream about visiting an island!”

No grownup I know would make a to-do list including something they ought to dream about. Hell, we wouldn’t even add to our bucket list that we want to touch the moon—though of course we do—because we’d shoot the rocket of that fantasy down before it could lift off our cognitive launch pad. (If Neil Armstrong had a bucket list when he was seven years old, I hope it included “touch the moon.”) I’m not sure we’d even admit to ourselves that we’d like to carve a totem pole or dance in the rain or eat cake with our hands. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t make a decent bucket list: because as a grownup I’ve fallen into the dark habit of editing life’s possibilities before they can be written, perhaps even before they can be thought. This represents not only a terrible failure of imagination, but in fact an active repression of it. I had only one thing on my bucket list—to make a bucket list—and I still couldn’t get it done. Reflecting on fame, Jimi Hendrix observed that “Once you’re dead, you’re made for life.” He ought to know. But for those of us who haven’t kicked the bucket yet, success is less certain. Should I try for world peace right away, or start with bungee jumping and work my way up? If every moment is unutterably precious, which it so clearly is, where do we begin the race to fulfill our dreams while there’s still time left to try?

Within a few days of creating their wonderful bucket lists, the girls did something else that a lot of grownups would find challenging: they set out to do as many of the listed activities as possible, placing a check mark next to each as it was completed. Hannah was able to “read a book in one day” and “make a parody of a song,” while Caroline managed to “dye rocks” and, thanks to the remoteness of the Ranting Hill, “snort at an antelope.” A freak desert downpour made it suddenly possible for both kids to “dance in the rain.” Hoping to get into the spirit of their attempt to accomplish the things on their bucket lists, I scanned the lists for something more immediately achievable than “touch the moon.” When I did, I noticed an item on Caroline’s list that I hadn’t seen before: “paint me and Hannah on a wall.”

“What do you mean by this one?” I asked Caroline, pointing to #68 on her list.

“You know, me and Hannah stand against a wall, like we’re shadows, and then we paint the shapes of our shadows on the wall,” she explained, with obvious concern that I might be too dimwitted to grasp the concept.

“Ah, ok. I get it now. You and sister grab some play chalk and come with me,” I instructed, marching out the door. The girls soon followed me to the tool shed, where I had found the better part of a gallon of cherry-apple red paint and two old brushes. “Now y’all stand against the shed in any position you want.”

“Really? This is going to be awesome!” said Caroline. Hannah announced, excitedly, that she intended to put this painting thing on her bucket list too, so she could cross it off later. The girls took their positions against the shed, remaining frozen while I patiently chalked their “shadows” against the tan wall of the outbuilding. Hannah posed with arms up, in the biceps flex of a bodybuilder; little Caroline became a superhero about to take flight. Then I popped the paint can open with my knife, handed each of them a brush, and suggested that they get to work on their bucket list.

Eryn and I sat nearby on a pair of bucked juniper logs and watched the girls at play. It took them a good while, but they never tired of the project, which they laughed their way through. Although Caroline accidentally painted Beauregard the dog a little, things went pretty smoothly. When the final strokes were complete, we all stood back and admired what had been wrought. The girls’ bright red silhouettes jumped off the drab wall of the shed, and two cherry-apple shadows of joy were added to our high desert fauna. In that moment, as we congratulated the girls on their painting, I finally realized exactly where to begin work on a bucket list: anywhere.

That evening we had a fine supper. Afterwards, we all ate cake with our hands.

]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssays2014/09/02 09:26:26 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: Hunting for Scorpionshttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/range/rants-from-the-hill-hunting-for-scorpions
Seeking out one of Earth’s most ancient land invertebrates.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

Our seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, is a tireless athlete, while her older sister, Hannah, is the family intellectual. This is why my wife, Eryn, and I were surprised when Caroline chose for her weeklong summer camp class “Ancient Egypt,” while her big sister also defied our expectations and decided on “Rock Climbing.” So while Hannah was learning belay knots and finger holds, little Caroline immersed herself in the culture of an ancient people who, like her, were fearless, hard-core desert dwellers. On the afternoon of her third day in camp, Caroline brought home her freshly made drawing of an Egyptian goddess whom I did not recognize.

“What is that cornucopia looking thing on top of this lady’s noggin?” I asked Caroline.

“It gets spelled different ways, but basically it is S-E-R-K-E-T. Around six or seven thousand years ago she was supposably the goddess of stings and bites. A lot of the old Egypt people thought she could protect them from scorpion stings. There was even a gold statue of her in there along with King Tut!” she explained. “Pretty epic, huh bro?”

A depiction of Serket from the Ptolemaic era in Egypt, which lasted from 237 to 57 BC. Image courtesy creative commons.

I may have been in detention in the principal’s office during the ancient Egypt unit in my own educational past, but somehow the scorpion on the head thing struck me as improbable, especially coming from a kid whose favorite beast—one of her own invention—is “Evil Unicorn.” In addition, seven thousand sounded like too many years, even for so ancient a culture. But a little research convinced me that Caroline had her story straight, and that Serqet (or Serket, or Selket) was indeed a powerful goddess dating all the way back to the Predynastic Period of Egyptian culture, which flourished between about 5500 and 3100 BC.

As a deification of the scorpion, Serqet represented genuine power in a culture for whom lethal scorpion stings would have been a very real threat. Her full name, “Serket hetyt” contains an intriguing dual reference to the gruesome asphyxiation that can be caused by a bad sting. The name may mean “she who tightens the throat,” a reference to the toxic power of the scorpion and its representative goddess; or, Serket hetyt may mean “she who causes the throat to breathe,” which instead suggests her power to protect or restore those who might otherwise perish from a sting. The scorpion is common in ancient Egyptian art, appearing painted on pottery, carved into schist palettes, and sculpted in metal. One of the very earliest hieroglyphic signs was the scorpion ideogram, which is found written in papyrus texts, carved into ivory and wood, and chiseled into stone monuments.

The evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane once observed that the Creator must have “an inordinate fondness for beetles,” because beetle species are so impressively numerous. He might well have added that the Creator seems to like scorpions a lot too. More than 1,700 species are known, and they exist on every continent except Antarctica. The fossil record is also rich in scorpions, and we know that this fascinating animal has existed in some form for around 450 million years, making it one of the oldest terrestrial invertebrates on the planet. There are scorpions in caves, in jungles, on prairies and savannahs, even high in the Andes and Himalayas. However, as the goddess Serqet reminds us, scorpions are most abundant in deserts. Of the 90 or so species in the U.S., almost all are found west of the Mississippi, and most live in the arid and semi-arid regions of the West. Here in Nevada we have something on the order of 20 species, and while some of those exist only down in Mojave country, up here in the Great Basin we have scorpions and plenty. They range from little tiny guys all the way up to the Northern Desert Hairy Scorpion (Hadrurus spadix), which can be almost six inches long—large enough to eat mice, lizards, snakes, and other scorpions.

We humans specialize in being afraid of things (and people, and ideas) that we don’t understand. While this spontaneous fear may retain some modest adaptive value, often it causes us to act like small-minded dummies and, even worse, to miss out on a lot of things that are remarkably cool. Many people would include scorpions, along with their cousins the spiders (both are arachnids and neither is an insect), in the category of “The one and only thing I know about this animal is that I’m scared of it.” Yes, it is true that all scorpions sting and that all are venomous. And, yes, they like to hide in places where they’re difficult to detect and then ambush their prey—or your foot—in a vicious attack. And, sure, they brutally crush their victim in their pinchers while stinging it with a paralyzing toxic soup of neurotoxins and enzyme inhibitors before subjecting it to a tissue-dissolving acid spray, after which they coolly slurp it up. But is this treatment any worse than what we rural westerners are subjected to by our local county commissioners? Of course young children (other than county commissioners) are at greater risk. The Mayo Clinic reports that after receiving a sting little kids may experience “convulsions, drooling, sweating, and occasionally inconsolable crying.” If this is an accurate description of symptoms, I hereby submit that all five-year-olds everywhere are being stung by scorpions all the time. I’ll allow that anyone who is allergic to scorpion venom is likely to have a rough time of it, but why malign these little arthropods when the same might be said of a damned peanut?

Actually, not many scorpions in the U.S. have a very potent sting. Southern Nevadans have to worry about the famously toxic bark scorpion, which likes to crawl up walls, hide behind framed pictures, and then creep out at night to drink your best whiskey before attacking and devouring you as you sleep. (Or something like that.) But I doubt even this fate could crack the top ten list called “Risks of Visiting Vegas.” Here in the northern desert, our scorpions all have friendly little stings that are something between a harvester ant bite and a bee sting. And since we have almost no gnats, chiggers, ticks, fleas, mosquitoes, wasps, yellow jackets, or hornets, we need something that can sting us just to keep us from getting soft.

One of the many amazing things about scorpions is that they glow in the dark. Or, to be more specific, they glow under ultraviolet light. There has been considerable debate about why a scorpion should have in common with a 1970s fuzzy poster of a ghost ship in your parents’ basement that it ignites under what stoners used to call “black light.” Some have maintained that this glow trick is a random accident of evolution, which is a theory that strikes me as unlikely and also just plain lazy. Others have wondered if the fluorescence is used to help scorpions hunt, but there’s no evidence to support this theory. Nor does it seem likely that the glow warns predators or allows communication between scorpions, though both explanations have intuitive appeal and do remain possible.

Scorpion in Nevada at night. Photograph by the author.

The current and most persuasive explanation for scorpion luminescence is far more incredible. Start with the fact that although scorpions have a pair of eyes on top of their cephalothorax (their “head-chest”) and another two to five pairs of eyes along the front sides of their cephalothorax, they have lousy eyesight. Or, to be more precise, they have decent sight within the blue-green spectrum and truly crappy vision outside of it. Now add to this that the main hazard of being a scorpion is that you might be spotted by moonlight (they’re nocturnal, after all) and get picked off by a predatory lizard, snake, rodent, or bird. The best way to avoid this is obviously to take cover. But how can the poor scorpion know whether it is being illuminated if its (many) eyes are unable to detect the wavelength of light that emanates from the moon and stars? It appears that their elegant solution has been to evolve a cuticle that is charged with beta-carboline and other luminescent chemicals. When the scorpion’s exoskeleton is struck by moonlight—which, as a reflection of sunlight, contains some of the same UV rays you use sunscreen to protect yourself from—it glows. In this sense the scorpion’s entire body functions as an eye, one that is highly sensitive to very small amounts of UV light. If a scorpion sees itself luminescing—which it can only because the wavelength of that luminesce falls in the blue-green spectrum—it knows that it is exposed and must seek cover. Somewhere deep in its 450-million-year-old nogginchest, the scorpion says to himself (or, to be fair to you ladies, herself): “Dang, my ass is glowing again. Better head for the sagebrush!”

The scorpion’s fabulous luminescence also means that desert rats like me can go traipsing about on moonless nights, UV flashlight in hand, looking for them. I should confess that it doesn’t take much to get me hiking around the desert in the middle of the night, but the experience of scorpion hunting is so special that I’d want to do it even if there were no wind in the sage and no stars in the sky.

Last night my buddy Steve—who, along with his wife, Cheryll, has the distinction of having been stung by scorpions—rolled up to the Ranting Hill to lead me on a land lobster expedition. It is essential that one have the proper high-tech equipment before undertaking this challenging and dangerous adventure. Please listen to me carefully, dear reader, because your life could depend upon being properly outfitted. You must have all of the following gear: a UV flashlight (ten bucks at the hardware store) and beer. To go afield lacking either could be risky.

Scorpion in Nevada at night. Photograph by the author.

Steve and I set out just after dusk, knowing that we had only 90 minutes before the rising of the full moon, which would flood the desert with light and send scorpions into hiding (remember the glowing ass epiphany?). It was also a breezy night, which is not ideal for a scorpion search. Because the animal stalks insects by detecting vibrations through sensory organs in the tips of its legs and specialized hairs on its pincers, wind can disturb its hunting strategy. Despite all this, it took only a minute or two for scorpions to pop out in the purple beams of our flashlights. Steve found one at the base of a native shrub I had planted a few days before. Another was by the woodpile, and a third near the girls’ treehouse. As we headed out into the open desert, we discovered others near juniper snags, around sage and bitterbrush, in the rice grass, and even out on sandy flats between patches of mule’s ears, whose dry leaves finned and scraped in the night breeze. Some of the scorpions held motionless like tiny lobsters. Others crawled along slowly. Yet others scurried with surprising speed to avoid us and tuck into their burrows, which are marked by small, arched holes in the desert floor. The scorpions glowed beautifully in otherworldly splashes of bright purple and pink beneath the UV beams as our lights tunneled through the darkness. When I looked up from one of our finds to survey the moonless sky, I noticed reddish Mars and bright, blue-white Spica unusually close to each other in the West. Hanging low in the South was Scorpio, the giant, gracefully curved constellation known since the time of the Babylonians as a scorpion. The unmistakable reddish gem of Antares (which means “rival of Mars”) shone brightly from the center of its celestial cephalothorax.

I am only slightly ashamed to admit that the high point of the evening was ogling scorpion sex. After all, this isn’t the kind of thing you see every night. Steve called me over to witness two scorpions doing what arachnophiles call the promenade à deux, which is a classy, Frenchified, non-pornographic term for the unique mating “dance” of the scorpion—an elaborate process that can take many hours and is highly ritualized. First the male grasps the female’s pedipalps (little mouth claws, like those seen in spiders) in his. Then the dude dances the lady scorpion around looking for a good place to deposit his spermatophore, the sperm packet that she will hopefully take into her genital operculum, thus triggering release of the sperm. This courtship dance can also involve “juddering,” in which the scorpions shudder and convulse, and the “cheliceral kiss,” during which the male uses his pincers to hold the female’s pincers in a gesture that looks to my human eye like holding hands. When this ritual dance is complete, the male retreats quickly, probably to avoid being gobbled up by his partner. Scorpions are ovoviparous, which means that the young are hatched within the female and only afterward born into the world. Once outside the female, the tiny scorplings will crawl onto her back and hang on there until they’ve moulted once and are ready to light out on their own.

Author's photograph of mating scorpions in a cheliceral kiss.

I have neighbors who say that in many years of living out here in Silver Hills they have never seen a scorpion. In 90 minutes of night hiking, Steve and I found 80 scorpions, two of which were dancing for the future, and each of which is an amazing, glowing little packet of 450 million years of evolutionary brilliance. I find it fascinating that in all this wide, wild, windy desert, nothing glows under UV light but the scorpion. What if we had a flashlight that emitted a beam that illuminated only spiders, and another that ignited only snakes, and another that revealed only rodents—or, better yet, separate wavelengths for ground squirrels, kangaroo rats, and bushy-tailed packrats? What if we were capable of matching the mind-boggling diversity, density, and richness of life here with a mode of perception that was equally rich?

After thinking deeply about our ability (and inability) to perceive nature, Henry Thoreau concluded that “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Those who dismiss my Great Basin landscape as “empty” may be looking at it, but they aren’t seeing it. This desert is emitting its spectacular beauty in a wavelength that their eyes have not yet evolved to detect. To say that this place is barren is simply to admit a profound ignorance that is the perceptual equivalent of blindness.

Down at the mailboxes this afternoon I told one of my fellow Silver Hillbillies about last night’s scorpion safari. “Where in the world do you find scorpions out here?” my neighbor asked.

I paused before answering. “Everywhere.”

]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssays2014/08/04 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: “Lawn Guilt”http://www.hcn.org/blogs/range/rants-from-the-hill-lawn-guilt
Rationalizing the devil’s crop“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

Henry David Thoreau’s neighbors generally thought of him as a lazy, confrontational, sanctimonious pain in the ass. They might be interested to know that he turned out to be right about nearly everything, from his strident support for the abolition of slavery, to his scathing exposure of the injustice of the Mexican-American War, to his embracing of then-new evolutionary theory, to his claim that the American relationship to nature was becoming commodified, superficial, and exploitative. Perhaps the best example of Thoreau being right ahead of his time is offered by his vehement condemnation of the American lawn. In his remarkable 1862 deathbed essay, “Walking,” Thoreau wrote that “Hope and the future are not in lawns.” Instead, he imagined establishing his home on a plot of land covered with wild plants and trees. “Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot,” he asked, “instead of behind that meager assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my front yard?”

Calling his neighbors’ front yards a “poor apology for a Nature and Art” is the sort of sarcastic face slap that cranky Uncle Henry specialized in, and it tells you something that one of his final utterances before leaving this world was a condemnation of lawns. As usual, he turned out to be right. Riddle: considered acre-for-acre, what is the most pesticide, herbicide, water, labor, and cash-intensive crop grown in the U.S.? Right. Your lawn. In America our turf grasses, which are non-native, cover 21 million acres (think the state of Maine), cost 40 billion dollars per year (more than U.S. foreign aid), consume around 90 million pounds of fertilizer and 80 million pounds of pesticides per year (which sometimes end up contaminating our ground and surface water), and drink an inconceivable eight billion gallons of water per day (here in the West, where we can least afford to squander the liquid gold, as much as half of all residential water use is associated with lawns and landscaping).

All this is before we reckon the colossal time suck that lawns represent: each year Americans spend an average of three billion hours pushing or (even worse) riding mowers, most of which pollute at a rate ten times that of our cars. In fact, if a lawn were a car, it would be a hummer: a resource-intensive, plainly unsustainable luxury item that looks pretty good but isn’t especially useful. As for biodiversity, forget it. Lawns are exotic, barren monocultures. While they are sometimes referred to as “ecological deserts,” this characterization is an insult to deserts, which are often remarkably biodiverse ecosystems. Then there are the unhappy symbolic connotations of the lawn. As food writer Michael Pollan points out, the American lawn is the ultimate manifestation of our culture’s perverse fantasy of the total control of nature. As Pollan put it so memorably, “A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”

Now hang with me while I descend from my eco-soapbox to offer this surprising confession: I have a lawn. I’m a westerner. A desert rat. An environmentalist. Even an admirer of Thoreau (though it does chap my hide that he’s always right). But I have a lawn and I love it. Of course my dual status as arid lands environmentalist and lawn-watering dolt has provoked in me a serious identity crisis, one that reminds me of another Thoreau insight (this one from Walden): “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand does.” Am I proud of my lawn? Hell no! I’m completely ashamed of it. I have a terminal case of lawn guilt. But at the risk of having my membership in the Wilderness Society revoked, it is time to come clean about my immoderate love of the lawn I have planted here on the Ranting Hill.

For me the first challenge is squaring a condition of brutal lawnlessness with fond memories of my suburban childhood, in which the grassy yard provided the most immediate respite from concrete and asphalt. Lawns were our play zones, the part of the vernacular landscape that could be experienced with all our senses, and one of the few suburban spaces not specifically designed to accommodate cars. Even if your old man was on his hands and knees pulling crabgrass every Saturday morning, for the rest of the week the lawn remained the sovereign province of children—a little patch of freedom that functioned as a clean, green canvas that we kids painted with our imaginations.

Trio of coyote pups denning near the Ranting Hill.

Like a lot of suburban boys, I also experienced the lawn as the first significant site of labor. Before I reached age 16 and landed a job stocking the beer cooler in the local drugstore, the lawn was the only game in town for an enterprising kid who was willing to work hard and needed a little cash. I built a pretty decent side biz as a mower, and in this sense the American lawn bought me a new bike, a fishing trip, and tickets to some memorable rock shows. As I got a bit older, lawn mowing even functioned as my French Foreign Legion. I spent one summer as a mower for a small company comprised entirely of guys who had been recently dumped by their girlfriends. My mowing partner that summer was a Harley dude named Chaos who somehow survived on a diet consisting solely of Schlitz beer and corn nuts. Sometimes Chaos and I would knock out 20 lawns in a day. Between yards we’d crank up Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the battered old truck’s cassette deck and lament that we’d been cast away by girls who, we told each other, just didn’t have their heads on straight. When I later got my own head on straight and went to college, so revered was the lawn that my school had a world famous precision lawnmower brigade that routinely stole the show from reputable marching bands during parades.

Of course those are memories from another place and time, and rationalizing turf grass here at 6,000 feet in the Great Basin Desert is another matter entirely. Still, I’m willing to attempt a modest defense. To begin with, our lawn is quite small, is on only one side of the house, and is surrounded by the rest of our property, 49 acres of wild desert that we have deliberately left undisturbed. I never use herbicides on the little yard, the fertilizer I apply is slow-release and organic, and the watering regime is strictly limited and carefully timed for efficiency. Outside the lawn, almost every tree and shrub I’ve planted is a local or regional native, most of which are hardy and xeric. The lawn keeps the dust down, and has also reduced the number of scorpions and rattlers we encounter immediately outside the house. Having the lawn also helps to cool the place in summer, working in tandem with our passive solar home design to make it possible for us to exist here without air conditioning.----

Unlike a suburban yard, our lawn functions as a kind of oasis. This is the only patch of green anywhere around, and is in fact the sole moist spot between here and a seep that is 1,000 feet above us and three miles to our west. In an area that receives only seven inches of precipitation each year—and most of that in the form of snow—a little water makes a lot of magic. Modest as it appears, our patch of grass sustains a bumper crop of insects, which has in turn made our home a haven for Say’s phoebes, western kingbirds, mountain bluebirds, scrub and pinyon jays, and many other bug-eating birds—and also a refuge for seed eaters like collared doves and California quail. The insects have also made this a terrific place to be a lizard, and we’ve seen an increase in our populations of both western fence and leopard lizards. And the lawn is cropped so constantly by cottontails and big, black-tailed jackrabbits that I hardly ever have to mow!

Hannah and Caroline cartwheeling on “the firebreak.”

All these insects, song birds, lizards, and small mammals have of course made this a prime location for raptors and coyotes, which have been quick to take advantage of the food chain reaction triggered by our damp spot. In fact the coyotes denned nearby this year, and for a month this spring we had the daily pleasure of watching three tiny pups peering out at us from the sage. The lawn has also become an oasis for our young daughters. I suppose Hannah and Caroline did fine playing in the alkali-encrusted caliche hardpan that existed here before I installed the lawn, but they now seem encouraged to play more games and do more handstands, not to mention enjoying the childhood rite of passage that entails running through the sprinklers after staining your tongue red or blue with popsicles.

I recognize that this defense of my lawn amounts to little more than morally feeble equivocation, which is why I make sure to keep handy a bourbon-barrel-sized load of guilt about it. Wallace Stegner wrote that we westerners need to “get over the color green,” but my challenge has instead been to get over having gotten over the color green. Driven by my shame to desperate measures, I recently had the bright idea to rebrand the lawn “the firebreak,” which is a concept everybody out here on this wildlands interface understands and respects. This is disingenuous on my part, since I maintain other firebreaks that function perfectly well without being lined with water-guzzling, non-native turf grass. But it just sounds better to say “firebreak,” so much so that I now insist that we all use that term and that term only, and in fact I fine the girls a quarter each time they say “lawn” by mistake. The family is pretty well retrained now, and so it is common for little Caroline to say, “Daddy, I’m going out to do cartwheels on the firebreak.”

Of course Henry Thoreau would have seen right through this turf grass apologia, and he would have instantly called horseshit on my cowardly rebranding of the unsustainable indulgence that is my lawn as a “firebreak.” But I do have a longer-term plan to mend my ways. When the girls go off to college (hopefully one with a brigade of precision lawn mowers to bring laughter to those boring parades) I’ll bring in three end dump truck loads of sand and bury the lawn completely, making a nice little beach up here in the heart of the sagebrush ocean. In the meantime, I’ve decided to ditch Thoreau and instead go with Walt Whitman, who in Leaves of Grass testified that “a blade of grass is the journeywork of the stars.” Journeywork of the stars just has such a lovely, ennobling, poetic ring to it. It isn’t as lyrical as “firebreak,” of course, but for now I’ll accept any substitute for that unspeakable, four-letter word: L***.

]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssays2014/07/07 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: Planting the Doghttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/range/rants-from-the-hill-planting-the-dog
A new ritual for sending your pet to heaven.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

The other day, while rummaging through a stack of unsorted papers, I came across a card that had been mailed to me about this time last year. Noting by the return address that it was sent from our veterinarian, I knew it would be a standard-issue expression of regret for the loss of our dog, who we had paid good money to have the vet put down a few days before the card arrived. Reasoning that I might as well have a look before tossing it in the recycling bin, I opened and read the card. It contained a stock expression of sympathy for “Darcy” (unnecessary quotation marks get quite a “workout” in “American” English). “You made a caring decision,” read the message, which was nestled in a field of little paw prints.

Well, ok, I thought. This is more sympathy than most folks get when they lose a cousin, and although the card misused quotation marks and didn’t contain a discount coupon, the sentiment seemed reasonable. But included within the card was a smaller card containing the text of a poem that I had seen on display in the special room within the vet’s office where customers wait with their soon-to-be-iced companions. A truly atrocious poem of uncertain provenance, “Rainbow Bridge” is six stanzas of mawkish reassurance not only that our dead dog will go to heaven, but also that we will be reunited with them there. This struck me as an ambitious claim, especially compared to “you made a caring decision,” which seemed reassuring without presuming too much.

According to “Rainbow Bridge,” dead dogs end up in a grassy meadow that functions as a timeless purgatory between heaven and earth, where they hang out in a roving pack of fellow mutts until that magical day when they cross over said bridge into an interspecies heaven where they experience a blissful moment of reunion with their human pal. A single stanza of this literary gem should suffice:

For just at that instant, their eyes have met;

Together again both person and pet.

So they run to each other, these friends from long past,

The time of their parting is over at last.

Even setting aside the deplorable quality of this ditty, which made me wonder if I should ask the vet to administer the pentobarbital to me instead of to Darcy, there are a number of problems here. First, the poem presumes not only that the reader is on board with the concept of heaven, but also that they want a bunch of dogs around when they get there. The poem does not specify whether there are fleas, ticks, or canine flatulence in heaven, or whether in the suburban parts of heaven you are required to pick up your angel dog’s feces with a plastic bag.

Even if you do subscribe to the idea of heaven, and even if you don’t mind a bunch of yelping dogs joining you there, consider the other problems with the “Rainbow Bridge” account of immortality. If this is really heaven, how do we know that all pet owners will make it through the pearly gates? Judging by my Silver Hillbilly neighbors, I’d be surprised if half of us are admitted into the land of fish fries and harp recitals. We’re more likely to end up in a very hot place—but one with more whiskey, which we might prefer in any case. And what of the dogs themselves? Assuming that the canine Saint Peter (or is it Saint Bernard?) has any standards at all, you’ve got to figure that most of these shoe-eating, garden-destroying, butt-sniffers are likely to be reunited with their masters in the underworld.

I’m also appalled that this poem is so patently illogical. Why relegate dogs to the timeless verdant meadows first? How about just sticking the non-heaven end of the rainbow bridge into the vet’s office and expediting the process of doggie salvation? And then there’s the troubling point that while this card is intended to reassure me, it presupposes that I am consoled by the contemplation of my own mortality. Sure, I’d like to be with Darcy again, but when it comes to reuniting with the dead my goal is to put it off as long as I can. Finally, the card from my vet indicates imprecisely that this poem is “inspired by a Norse legend.” This is an indirect reference to the Bifröst Bridge, which in Norse mythology is a burning rainbow that links this world (called Midgard) to Asgard, the realm of the gods. But the thirteenth-century Icelandic Eddas clearly foretell the collapse of this bridge, which in any case is perpetually aflame and spans a river of boiling water—an apocalyptic vision of the afterlife that is a far cry from the blithe reassurances of the insipid “Rainbow Bridge.”

But here’s the problem with making fun of this ridiculous poem: it hurts like hell to lose your dog. As I waited with Darcy for the vet to come into the room to dispatch her, I was as choked up as I’ve ever been. Researchers who study emotional attachment and separation have found that the bonds we have with our pets are often comparable to those we have with our fellow humans. To make matters worse, we are often confused about how to reckon the loss of a pet, because in the case of these nonhuman loved ones our culture has no ritual of parting—unless you’re willing to count reading freaking “Rainbow Bridge” through streaming tears in a veterinarian’s office. The nerds who study this stuff use the term “disenfranchised grief” to refer to a form of very real sadness that we nevertheless aren’t quite sure we’re allowed to feel. As one grief geek observed, “socially sanctioned mourning procedures, such as funerals, do not occur following the death of a pet, even though research shows that they are critical to the healing process.”

We named Darcy for the song “Darcy Farrow,” which features references to western Nevada’s Walker River and Carson Valley, and which includes these words in its final stanza: “They sing of Darcy Farrow where the Truckee runs through, / They sing of her beauty in Virginia City too.” She was a wonderful dog, a true member of our family who was gentle with our young daughters but also tireless in the field with me. I’ve done the redneck math: Darcy and I walked more than 12,000 miles together across these remote desert canyons, playas, and mountains. It is impossible to share that much time with a dog—that many beautiful experiences of this remarkable land—and not become bonded in a deeply meaningful way. Several years ago Darcy was pack hunted by a band of coyotes and was sliced to ribbons before narrowly escaping. When she came limping home, her fur matted and blood-soaked, I thought she was a goner. But the vet shaved her down and stitched her up, and though she looked like a canine Frankenstein for several months, she recovered fully and lived to walk another few thousand miles with me.

When it came time to say goodbye, it didn’t do any damned good to tell myself that Darcy was “just a dog.” As a confirmed desert rat I knew that I should take my dog, gun, and shovel out into the sage and take care of this myself. But when that inevitable day arrived I just couldn’t do it, and that is how I became a reader of “Rainbow Bridge.” That is also how I came into possession of a small, cedar box containing dog ashes, which were produced at additional expense when, in an already excruciating moment, I learned that my dog’s body would be disposed of as “clinical waste.” What difference should it make what becomes of a dead dog, however much beloved in life? I still don’t know the answer to this question, but in that moment it was an easy call to trade money for the assurance that my 12,000-mile trail companion wouldn’t leave this world in a dumpster.

It is finally time to finish this story. If ceremonies of mourning are necessary to grieving, and if our culture lacks rituals of parting from nonhuman friends, then we’ll just have to act like the resourceful, imaginative people we are and invent one of our own. The unusual desert rainstorm that has blasted us for two days is now over, and the sky has begun to clear. The wildfire up in the hills to the south has finally been extinguished, and the Washoe Zephyr has at last ceased howling. I’m taking this little cedar box, and a wooden-handled spade, and an ice-cold IPA, and I’m hiking up onto a nearby hillside that is graced by a single juniper. There I’ll dig a small hole in this sandy soil before raising a toast to Darcy and our shared trail. Then I will kneel down among the sage and plant my dog. As a final gesture, I’ll stand at attention and read aloud the terribly sappy “Rainbow Bridge.” Although it will be impossible for me not to laugh, it is also certain that I will weep, because that is so necessary. My newly developed ritual will of course be inadequate, but it is a memorial gesture that must pass for reunion here in this remote desert, which is our only earth and also our only heaven.

]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssays2014/06/02 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: The Moopetshttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/range/rants-from-the-hill-the-moopets
When even the Muppets trash your home town.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

Although I’ve written 45 of these Rants from the Hill since the essay series launched back in July, 2010, there’s one word I have studiously avoided using. It is a filthy word, one that immediately conjures up a range of unpleasant associations. It is so very nasty that even I knew better than to allow this word to creep into a single sentence of a single Rant. Needless to say, it is a four-letter word. But I have decided that, as a Nevada writer, I must now reveal this dirty word. To quote the Eighties Robot character in the 2011 movie The Muppets: “R. E. N. O. That spells Reno.”

In fact, I have the Muppets to thank—or, more accurately, to blame—for my need to finally reveal this foul word. Not long ago I was watching The Muppets with my two young daughters when, to my surprise, I glanced up to see a shot of the famous Reno Arch, an unmistakable local landmark which spans the main street of our downtown and reads “Biggest Little City in the World.” “Look, girls!” I exclaimed, pointing at our town on the TV screen. “The Muppets have come to Reno!” It goes without saying that this was big news, because it suggested that our little city was going to get its fifteen minutes of fame—an outcome virtually assured by the fact that loving the Muppets is one of only four things all Americans have in common (the other three: hate taxes, think we sound great singing in the shower, can’t understand why Kim Kardashian is famous). Having your town appear in a Muppet movie is like receiving the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, with the important difference that nobody has subscribed to Good Housekeeping since 1959, while this Muppet flick opened in 3,500 theaters and grossed north of 90 million bucks.

Although I didn’t mention it to the girls, I was also thrilled that Reno, which is a lovely town but one with a bad reputation, might at last be associated with something wholesome. In fact, the nasty reputation of northern Nevada in the broader culture hasn’t changed appreciably since it was characterized by my patron saint, Mark Twain, back in 1862: “If the devil were set at liberty and told to confine himself to Nevada Territory, he would get homesick and go back to hell again.” Some might argue that we brought this dubious reputation on ourselves by cultivating the questionable economic strategy of making legal whatever is illegal elsewhere, which is what we did, by turns, with prizefighting, gambling, divorce, and prostitution (which begs the question of how we let anybody beat us to legalizing same-sex marriage and weed). But for that one brief and shining moment, sitting with my beautiful daughters and watching Kermit rolling into Reno in his Rolls-Royce Silver Spur, I indulged a fantasy of redemption. I was, for that breathless instant, another benighted Nevadan just waiting for that third seven to spin into place.

As so often happens in Reno, however, my fortunes changed rapidly, unexpectedly, and for the worse. The film cut suddenly to an even more familiar site: a small, run-down casino out on the edge of town, a place I drive by each day while taking the girls to school. This particular casino’s proximity to the local feed store, the rural liquor store, and a dilapidated taproom virtually ensured my familiarity with it—this is, after all, my own personal redneck strip mall—and though I haven’t yet had occasion to use the bail bondsman whose storefront is just across the gravel parking lot, I find it comforting to know that he’s close by in a pinch. The Muppets were now really on my home turf: they had fled the city proper for the broken down rural-urban edge that is my natural habitat.

To appreciate why the Muppets’ cinematic appearance at my local watering hole and poker parlor appeared so inauspicious, you need to understand the film’s basic plotline. The trip to northern Nevada is part of Kermit’s heroic quest to get the old Muppet crew back together again to put on one last show, the proceeds of which will save the Muppet studios in Hollywood from the clutches of an avaricious oil baron. The frog’s odyssey to reunite his troop leads him to my local casino because the Muppets’ stand-up comic, Fozzie Bear (the ursine humorist who, along with Twain, is my other patron saint), has fallen on hard times and has been driven to—of all the God-forsaken hell holes in the big West—Reno. Here, in the darkness on the edge of town, Fozzie has in desperation assembled the “Moopets,” a second-rate Muppet tribute band consisting of unconvincing Muppet impersonators, including Miss Poogy, Kermoot, and Animool, the latter a cheap knock off of the manic, hairy drummer Muppet who is here played with genuine panache by a real-life rock superstar, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.

The scene inside the casino is itself a tribute to vintage Reno despair—a despair so authentic and mundane as to be both hilarious and startlingly familiar. When Kermit and his pals enter the derelict casino Fozzie is already onstage with the flaccid Moopets, whose boredom is palpable. Surrounding the little stage are a few slumped-over, zoned-out patrons who are, if possible, even more jaded and inattentive than the half-assed tribute band itself. One may be a hooker. Several others are certainly drunks. Singing a lame casino advertisement to the tune of the Muppets’ celebrated anthem, “Rainbow Connection,” the stuffed bear croaks out a few uninspired lines:

Miss Poogy, a brilliant send-up of the famous (and famously lascivious) Muppet lady pig, exaggerates Miss Piggy’s forceful personality, portraying her as a rough-mannered, baritone hog thug who appears to be a cross-dressing porker dude in a cheap wig. “I said ‘what are you looking at?’” we hear Miss Poogy say, through a coarse laugh, “So I punched him in the face.”

The Reno stereotypes pile up thick as alkali dust when Kermit and Fozzie retreat to the bear’s “dressing room,” which turns out to be nothing more than a huddling of crappy furniture in the open alley behind the casino. As the frog and bear speak awkwardly of what Fozzie’s life has come to, we hear in the background five pistol shots, followed by a police siren, squealing tires, and a cop on a bullhorn yelling “Step out of the vehicle!” When Kermit, who is now stammering self-consciously, like a green Woody Allen, expresses concern for his friend’s destitution, the bear responds “Look at me: I’m living the dream!” This ironic outburst is followed immediately by a flash of lightning, a peal of thunder, and a downpour—clearly metaphorical weather, since you’d sooner draw to an inside straight than see a thunderstorm around here. Grasping at a last scrap of pride despite his abysmal condition, Fozzie tries to console both himself and his amphibious friend: “It’s alright, Kermit, it’s not your fault. We had a good run.” And with this grim observation the now not-so-comic bear incisively encapsulates the Reno experience. The message is unmistakable: this town is the final whistle-stop on the route of a train that is headed in the wrong direction. Reno is depicted as the place where dreams—even sweet and innocent Muppet dreams—come to die.

My little daughters quickly recognize the familiar exterior of the casino, though of course they’ve never been inside. “Hey, isn’t that right across the street from where we get the baby chicks every spring?” asked Caroline, the seven-year-old.

Eleven-year-old Hannah had a harder question: “Dad, is it really like that in there? All smoky and dark with not very good music and everybody asleep at their tables?”

Little Caroline followed up excitedly: “So the Muppets are right about Reno after all!”

“Well . . . not really,” I said, a little defensively. “Ok, sort of. Well, ok, yes. Alright. I guess the Muppets are right about Reno.”

This exchange forced me to revisit the vexing question of how I should respond to the negative stereotypes that plague this town. One approach is to fight back with the facts: Reno has a vibrant arts community, a beautiful river corridor, incredible weather, and amazing access to desert and mountain wilderness. It is a town full of nice people—unpretentious people with plain common sense who don’t try to convert you to their religion. It’s a place where you can order a rye Manhattan without having to explain that you don’t want a damned maraschino cherry in it. Or I could take a different tack, by pointing out that folks who live here can take a joke, and for that reason we appreciate the brilliance of the Muppets’ parody of us. For example, we really are the town of the sorry tribute band. Off the top of my head, performances here have included Who’s Bad (Michael Jackson, though the name says it all), Live Wire (AC/DC, the “blunder from down under” resurrected), One Night of Queen (not a transvestite cabaret show, though we have those too), Voyage (a faux Journey, which was a band so bad that a knock-off has to be an improvement), and Eliminator (ZZ Top, complete with the mega-beards they made cool a generation before Duck Dynasty). We know how to laugh at ourselves, which explains why so many of us went into mourning when Comedy Central’s mockumentary series Reno 911! folded back in 2009.

Instead, though, I’d rather defend Reno within the terms of the stereotype itself.

I think again of the real place that is parodied in the Muppet movie. Some of the folks inside that old casino may be past their prime, but they’re still welcomed. There’s a unique kind of tolerance there, where the down but not quite out find a temporary home. You can’t tell a millionaire from a bum around here, which is fine by me (especially since I look like a bum and would just as soon have people wonder). Maybe some folks think that we can’t separate the wheat from the chaff—that we’re not smart enough to judge winners and losers. Then again, maybe we are and just don’t.

Remember this important point: Reno keeps Fozzie off the street until he is rediscovered. And that is the part of the Muppet send-up of our town that I treasure the most. It is here that Fozzie lands when he has no place to go, when he is utterly without prospects. This is precisely what allows Kermit to find the bear, whom he recruits to reenter a life of fame and fortune. Fozzie is no doubt back on Broadway now, but without our town, who knows? After all, nobody wants to contemplate a Muppet suicide or overdose. Besides, I’ve been sleepy over a beer once or twice myself, listening to a musician or comedian who hadn’t had their break yet, or who had it long ago and was trying for a long-odds comeback. Any town might have given Fozzie his first big break, but only Reno could give him something more precious by far: a second chance. Who in hell would want to live near a town like this? The lovers, the dreamers, and me.

]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssays2014/05/05 08:35:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: Road Captainhttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/range/road-captain
What happens when a redneck gets a promotion.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

Last night I got a phone call with the bad news that I have received what my neighbors out here in the remote Silver Hills refer to as a “redneck promotion.” To be specific, I have been promoted from plain member and citizen to Road Captain, which is a position no sensible person would covet. Despite the cool name and apparently elevated rank, the job is without compensation or administrative support, is unelected, and descends on you by fiat when the current Road Captain tells you you’re it.

The road to the Ranting Hill is 2.3 miles in length and has eight houses scattered along it. It is a terrible road which sometimes degenerates to pure caliche mud in winter and bone rattling washboard in summer. There have been times when it was so dry and abused as to be barren of gravel; at others it has been impassable because the water flowed across it in an unbroken sheet. Many seasons it is so muddy that we Silver Hillbillies must resort to hanging around in town drinking beer after work just to kill enough time for the mud to freeze up so we can cross it to reach our homes. There have been winters when the ruts in the muddy roadbed became so deep that if your wheels dropped into them your truck would glide along like a vegetable peeler, the skid plates cleanly shearing off and polishing the surface off the road. The road’s ditches are full of silt, the few culverts have crushed heads, and if there were ever any road signs they have long since blown away in the Washoe Zephyr or been hung on a horseshoe nail in somebody’s pole barn. (Our mailboxes are all crooked and our addresses are out of numerical order, too, but that’s a story for another day.) Here’s the kicker: this is a “private” road, which means that while the county won’t maintain it nobody else wants to either. So who, by default, is in charge of stewarding this mess? The Road Captain.

The new Road Captain at work.

Many years ago we had a neighborhood association out here, to which we paid modest annual dues that were used for nothing but road work and snow removal. But most Silver Hillbillies are by nature unsociable, misanthropic, and paranoid, a worldview that inclines us toward conspiracy theories and radical libertarianism. As a result, a majority of my neighbors voted to get rid of the association, which they regarded as oppressed peasants do an occupying foreign army. The theory seemed to be that anybody who would collect association dues would soon come for our whiskey and guns. Once the association was disbanded it was every man for himself, which is precisely the arrangement most of my stubborn, independent, and heavily armed neighbors prefer.

Ever since the neighborhood association was busted up the roads out here have become even worse, and some roads have even descended into social chaos. On one nearby road which has only four houses, each neighbor has adopted the same strategy of trying to outwait the other three to see who will find the road so intolerable that they give in and fix it themselves. So far nobody has surrendered, even when for weeks at a time they were all forced by deep mud to park out at the paved road and hike up to their homes. On another road a guy who is especially entrepreneurial bought an expensive grader in hopes he’d have a field day, but because he was once seen having a beer with our local real estate developer nobody would hire him, and the bank took his shiny grader back pretty quick. On a third road a guy who had repaired the roadbed at his own expense threatened to install a toll gate if his skinflint neighbors wouldn’t pony up.

On our road this sort of chaos was averted only through the leadership of my friend Ludde, the seventy-year old man who lives on 60 acres across the draw from the Ranting Hill. He is hands down the toughest and most curmudgeonly guy I’ve ever met, which is another way of saying that he is my role model. Ludde has for some years been our Road Captain, and it is a role that suits him perfectly. He doesn’t speak often, but when he does everybody pays attention. For example, while riding his big horse out in the desert he is fond of mentioning to illegal off-roaders, wherever he finds them, that “this is my favorite place to shoot, because I’d never expect anybody to be riding here. Why, a fella could get himself killed.” You’d be scared of this guy even if he didn’t have a twelve-gauge in a saddle scabbard by his right shin, which he does. On another occasion Ludde confronted a dirt biker who was shredding our road. The biker, who didn’t know who he was talking to, cussed the old man out and tore off. Ludde climbed into his F-350 and chased the motorcyclist for several miles along BLM roads at high speed until the biker finally laid it down on a loose turn. Ludde left his truck running and walked slowly up to the young man, who lay sprawled near his wrecked bike with a badly broken arm. Looking down with a grin Ludde said, “Looks like your arm is bent funny, partner. Well, nice day for a walk.” And with that he cocked his buckaroo hat, climbed back into his rig, and drove contentedly home.

It takes that kind of grit to be an effective Road Captain. One time a neighbor on the road to the south of us went rogue and drove overland across her property and some public land to use our road because hers was in such bad shape. On the day the lady pioneered her new route, Ludde intercepted her and explained that if she wanted to use our road she’d have to pay the same amount the rest of us do to keep it up. The woman not only refused, but produced a .30-06 deer rifle, which she gripped while responding that she’d do as she pleased. Ludde didn’t blink. As he walked away, he said only “We bought a little rock for the road. Let me know by morning if you want to pay your share.” The next morning Ludde had two end dump truck loads of road base deposited in in the mouth of the makeshift driveway the lady was using to access our road. I’ll spare you the math: this is a quarter of a million pounds of gravel. Ludde left that monster pile there for the better part of a year, by which time the woman had learned what the rest of us already knew: you don’t mess with our Road Captain.

Beauregard finds a bad spot in the Road.

To be such a tough guy, though, Ludde is also resourceful and flexible. Whenever a neighbor couldn’t afford to pay their fair share he’d offer to cover them until their cash flow improved. Once he let a neighbor work off his road dues doing roofing work on Ludde’s barn, after which Ludde paid the man’s share. Another neighbor who has a big tractor but little money contributes by doing ditching work along the road. Yet another never pays American dollars, but always produces two loads of “rock” (shorthand for type two road base gravel), which is a meaningful contribution even though no money changes hands. Indeed, Ludde understands that rock is the coin of the realm out here—a kind of redneck Bitcoin—and that it can be traded for almost anything. A neighborly trade might involve farrier tools, a case of rye, a calf, or a truck winch, and that is fine with Ludde, so long as the exchange ends in the common currency of rock, which then goes down on our road.

When I answered the phone last night, Ludde’s first words were “I’ve got some good news for you.”

“Let me guess. You didn’t shoot anybody today?” I replied.

“I’ve already told everybody else on the road,” he continued, ignoring me. “And more good news: this redneck promotion comes with a six-pack. Congratulations.”

“Ludde, please tell me this isn’t what I think it is. Please. What have I ever done to you? Haven’t I been a good neighbor all these years?” I asked.

“Yup. That’s why I have confidence in you, Captain,” he replied, only emphasizing the word “captain” a little.

“Listen,” I pleaded. “You were born to do this job. I don’t have the cojones to run this road. Why in hell would you want me?”

“Because you’re fair. Not very tough, but fair. And you’re one of the only folks on the road who hasn’t been threatened with a gun,” Ludde explained.

“Yeah, but that’ll change as soon as I’m Captain. These Silver Hillbillies will eat me alive.”

“Comes with the territory, son. Besides, this is easy. What did I do when old lady Jenkins said we should reckon each person’s dues by their distance from the paved road?” he asked.

“Nothing?” I guessed.

“How about when Matt wanted to figure dues by how many vehicles each family drives?”

“Not a thing,” I answered.

“And when Smitty complained about the weight of Roper’s flatbed? Or when Bill said he wouldn’t pay up until Janie did? Or when Jesse put buckshot into the side of the Fed Ex truck because it was going too fast?”

“Nothing,” I repeated. “Not a damned thing.”

“Got the picture, Captain? Everybody pays the same amount, due at the same time, unless they make a trade or show up with rock. Simple.”

“I really don’t want to do this, Ludde, but you’ve left me no choice. Can I at least call on you for help when things get rough?”

“Nope,” he replied. “Now you go share this good news with Hannah and Caroline. It isn’t every little girl has a Daddy who’s a Road Captain. And drop by for that six-pack anytime.”

All photographs are by the author.

]]>No publisherRants from the HillEssays2014/04/07 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: IH8 DMVhttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/range/ih8-dmv
On a quest to find the perfect vanity license plate.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

I’ve always been impressed by vanity license plates—at least when they’re genuinely clever or funny—and have long thought that a little back bumper wit on my part might help my fellow Silver Hillbillies endure the one stoplight that interrupts our 25-mile cruise from here to town. But there are perfectly good reasons why I’ve never managed to make a move on customized license plates. First, I’m so practical as to have trouble rationalizing an expense that is so obviously unnecessary. Second, I like to change my mind about things, and so have been hesitant to commit to any one message, however witty or insightful. Most important, though, to get customized plates I’d have to actually go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, a place that is the seventh circle of bureaucratic hell even in a world already overflowing with superfluous administrative horseshit. I just haven’t thought of a vanity plate that would be funny enough to make it worth the misery of spending an afternoon at the DMV.

Of course that didn’t keep me from thinking about the possibility, and occasionally I’d toy with an idea for a tag. I figured I’d go with something that would assert my identity as a high desert hillbilly, like DSRT RAT or BSN RNGE or GR8 BSN or DSRT MTN. Even something like NEWWEST could be cool. Or I might instead go with a cute, place-based proclamation like IM SAGE, or maybe I could tap the nickname we use for rattlers out here: BZZZWRM. It also occurred to me that I could cleverly use the fact that our state tags boldly say NEVADA atop them to create a two-word slogan by adding NO WSTLD, since “Nevada: Not a Wasteland” is the slogan used by those of us who would just as soon not have the nation’s nuclear waste buried here. Another two-word message could be produced by choosing WD OPN, since another of our many equivocal state mottoes is “Nevada: Wide Open,” a slogan that seems vaguely to refer not only to landscapes but also to accelerators and legs.

An Arizona vanity plate. Photograph by Flickr user Michael Buist.

While I was dreaming up customized Nevada tags I came up with a lot of ideas that I thought might work for somebody else in Silver Hills, if not for me. One of my neighbors who is a professional poker player might either DBL DWN or FOLDEM. The old lady at the only gas station in our valley likes to play slots, so she could hope to HIT 37S. The guy up the road from us raises longhorns and so might like to claim that he has BIG BLLS. Or maybe not. But he could still use STEERNG. My friend who paints desert landscapes should use RBBT BRSH, and our neighborhood dowser could ask WHRS H2O. All the equestrians out here can argue over BITBYBIT, and the lady mining engineer might confess to being a GLD DGR. Our road’s resident conspiracy theorist should have CNA UFO. And our mail delivery woman, who is very nice but nevertheless has frosted blonde hair, poor taste in clothes, and a lower back tattoo that reads “LADY,” might do well to order up NTA HKR.

I also found a website called something like ZILLIONTAGS.COM, which not only had thousands of actual vanity plates but also had them organized by state, which I thought might help me determine where the good ideas were coming from. Of course I began with my home state, which I soon discovered had mounted the most pathetic custom tag display imaginable. Nevada had a total of four entries: IHVNOJB, 99 PROBS, IH8 WMPS, and the incredibly dumb NOT DUM. Next I turned to Utah, which provided no encouragement whatsoever. Utahans are either too frugal or too well-mannered to excel at self-expression in the highly specialized medium of the vanity plate. Like Nevada, Utah boasted a total of four entries, three of which I couldn’t understand; the fourth was GOLFING, which struck me as genuinely depressing. Next I tried Idaho, which had a whopping five tags, not a single one of which made a lick of sense to me. Could these be survivalist code messages instructing rural neighbors to hoard whiskey and guns?

In desperation I turned to Oregon, whose tags were weirdly sincere, like B YRSLF and GOD NO1 and BE GR8R, though one lady who reminded me of an old girlfriend had confessed to having PMS 247. Thankfully I found that the Sand Cutters down in Arizona were more creative, and had come through not only with many more tags but also with a variety of respectable entries, including AEIONU, SCO BEDO, IMLAME, VNTY PL8, MMMBEER, FATTKID, and RCY BOBY, not to mention the charmingly confessional IFARTED.

A Colorado vanity plate. Photograph by Flickr user Shawn Honnick.

Although the plates of a few Arizonians were slightly risqué, like GETNAKD and IL SPNKU, they couldn’t hold a candle to the work of my neighbors to the west. California had hundreds of custom tag entries, at least half of which were pornographic. Even those that were not explicitly sexual seemed obsessed with power and money – a sentiment elegantly distilled by 2L8 I1 on a new jag. But the California tags were also expressive, irreverent, and comical in ways that might prove instructive over in Utah and Idaho. Among the countless solid entries from the Californicators were FROMMYX (on a Mercedes), MO FAUX (on a Caddy), JST 1MPG (on a Hummer), FRENDLY (on a creepy, windowless panel van), BLONDE (with the tag mounted upside down), GEEKDAD (on a Prius), H8LAFWY (on an old pickup), UGHHHHH (on a Tercel), and my personal favorite: CMON WTF (on a yellow VW bug).

Despite all this inspiration, I still hadn’t come up with anything sufficiently clever to drive me into the dreaded DMV. But all that changed on my last birthday, when my wife Eryn said that she had made up my mind for me, adding that the deed was done and the plates were already ordered. She refused to tell me what message my custom tags would proclaim, but she seemed confident that I’d like it, and at this point I had no alternative to being vocally appreciative and silently curious.

The state bureaucrats aged my paperwork as if it were a fine Pappy Van Winkle rye, but after several months we finally received word that my custom plates were available for pickup. Of course fetching my new slogan meant a trip to the dreaded DMV. I considered putting a fat splash of Pappy in my java on the day I had set aside for this onerous chore, and although my prudence triumphed over my anxiety I confess that the prospect of being stone cold sober at the DMV was an unhappy one. This instinct was confirmed as I arrived at the facility, where the inadequate parking had triggered a Darwinian battle for spaces in which I was twice nearly sideswiped. As I entered the building I took a number and then sat down to wait on the DMV chairs, torture devices which are bolted to the cinder block walls and made of wire mesh that leaves a grid pattern on your butt – though in truth the mesh may have been practical, given that several of my fellow citizens looked as if they might at any moment begin to urinate on themselves.

I say “my fellow citizens” because a visit to the DMV offers a spectacularly disturbing opportunity to witness what a cross-section of local humanity actually looks like. On one side of me sat an older man who sounded as if he were in the midst of negotiating the specifics of an important business deal. Only later did I notice that he had no Bluetooth headset but was instead simply talking to himself. The young man sitting on the other side of me had a haircut that looked as if somebody had slapped a small soup bowl on his noggin and shaved everything below the rim. He passed the time by loudly repeating every number as it was called by the DMV’s automated voice system. “Three hundred sixty nine,” said the robot speaker, calmly. “Oh yeah! That’s right! Three hundred and sixty nine!” yelled hair tuft guy. “Three hundred seventy,” said the quiet, mechanical voice. “Yeah baby! Three hundred and seventy! That’s what I’m talking about!” shouted the man. I looked down at my number and winced. 482. I had a long way to go.

Nearby a lady was giving herself a full pedicure, complete with those little spacers that splayed her toes while the toxic fumes, perhaps mercifully, gave those of us around her a mild contact high. There were babies crying, and people snoring, and a deaf man playing a ukulele that was out of tune. Near two teenagers who were passing the time by making out sat an angry looking lady in a full clown suit, who was herself sitting next to a young woman wearing a tight T-shirt that advertised for the famous Mustang Ranch brothel. Let’s face it, blithe platitudes about democracy, equality, and love for one’s fellow man are sorely tested here at the DMV. I doubt that even Pete Seeger, may he rest in peace, could have endured more than an hour here. The DMV is the place where populist sentiment comes to die.

After the better part of two more hours the automated voice finally called my number, although I didn’t notice that until I was startled to attention by the unflagging enthusiasm of hair tuft guy, who shouted “No lie, people! I’m preaching the gospel truth here! I’m talking four hundred and eighty two!” I walked up to the DMV lady who occupied the chair beneath the flashing number 482 and politely presented my folder, which contained all the required documents: registration, smog check, proof of insurance, and receipt for custom plate payment. The lady sat motionless, staring at me with a completely expressionless face that offered not a single word. “Um, ok,” I stammered, “I’m here to pick up some customized plates. I have all the necessary paperwork. My name is Michael Branch.” After a silent pause that seemed interminable, the lady rose stiffly from her chair and without a word simply shuffled away like an overmedicated zombie. She may have been going to get my new tags, but that was not at all clear to me, and after five minutes I began to wonder if she had gone on a cigarette break, or perhaps even left for the day. Or maybe she had simply stepped into the mailroom to pour some whiskey into her coffee, a sensible measure that I was already regretting not having taken myself.

Zombie lady eventually shuffled back and reoccupied her place in front of me. When after another long pause she finally spoke, her entire discourse consisted of only two words, which were phrased as a question: “Five bucks?” I pulled out my wallet, plunked an Abe Lincoln on the counter, and waited to see what might happen next. She reached out and slowly slid a large, manila envelope across the counter, completing the motion by drawing the five spot back. She quietly folded her hands over the bill. “Have a nice day,” she said in an expressionless monotone.

It was not until I staggered back out into the light of day that I opened that envelope and pulled out out what to this day remains the finest birthday gift I’ve ever received.

The author's new vanity plate. Courtesy Michael Branch.

The beauty of being a humor writer is that everything in life that isn’t pleasure is still material, and in that sense ranting has inoculated me against despair. In the life of a RANTER, a good day becomes a memory, a bad day becomes a story, and even a visit to the DMV can have a happy ending.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesBlog Post2014/03/03 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleRants from the Hill: The Great Basin Sea Monsterhttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/range/the-great-basin-sea-monster
How to build a forty-foot marine reptile out of stove logs“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.

Last Saturday around noon I was still feeling desperate for more alone time when my daughters Hannah (age 10) and Caroline (age 7) asked if I was finally ready to play with them. I had been making excuses all morning, explaining that I needed to get Beauregard the dog out for a hike, that I had to spend some time splitting wood, that it was important for me to haul rock to riprap a drainage trench I had recut with the tractor. In truth these chores were an excuse to drink beer, listen to tunes, and have a little time to sift the week’s detritus through my partially clogged noggin filter. “It occurs to me that you girls haven’t watched enough TV today,” I replied, beer in hand. “Let me recommend Scooby Doo. Facilitates cerebral development. Worked for me, anyhow. Besides, your teachers aren’t going to help you learn important words like ‘Zoinks’ and ‘Jinkies’. Why don’t you meddling kids go fire up a couple of episodes?”

At just that moment my wife Eryn stepped around the corner of the house, frowning at her irresponsible husband. “Ruh-roh,” I muttered, changing my tune. “Girls, much as I hate to deprive you of more Scoob and Shag, let’s go play. What did you have in mind?”

One of the author's beers of choice, 'Icky' Ipa from Great Basin Brewing.

“Let’s build something ginormous!” exclaimed little Caroline.

“I think we should build a gigantic one of those,” said Hannah, pointing at the label on my beer bottle. “What is that cool thing, Dad?” I had been drinking the best beer brewed in my town, an Ichthyosaur IPA from Great Basin Brewing – a barleypop fondly called an “Icky” by all brewfully inclined western Great Basinians.

“That, my dear, is an Ichthyosaur. It was a giant marine reptile that swam around Silver Hills when this place was beneath the ocean a couple hundred million years ago. It also happens to be the state fossil of Nevada.” At first the girls didn’t believe me that states have their own representative fossils. “Yup,” I continued, “but most of them aren’t as cool as ours. Arizona’s is petrified wood. Lame. In Tennessee it’s the bivalve. Bivalve? Lamer. Connecticut? Dinosaur tracks. Lamest of all, because the state fossil of Massachusetts was already dinosaur tracks. But Nevada has a big old sea lizard. We rock.” I hoisted the bottle in cheers and downed the last of my Icky.

With that Caroline raised both puny arms above her head and shouted “Let’s build a giant Itchy-sore!” Of course Hannah wanted to know what we would build it out of, and I confess that the prospect of constructing a giant sea lizard registered with me as the ten thousandth time I had felt myself inadequate to a task that was suddenly very important to my kids. “How about firewood?” Eryn suggested. I grinned in reply. “That, my friend, is genius. Let’s do it! Girls, y’all go make a quick sketch of a sea monster, and I’ll hook up the trailer and get your work gloves.”

Twenty minutes later I had us ready to haul wood, and the girls had drawn a prototype marine reptile. In addition to having a serpentine shape that would make it look like it was wriggling through the ocean of our Nevada desert, it would also have a series of big humps, each of which would be larger than the last as we worked our way toward the head. And Eryn added a creative twist: if we could build our sea beast with high humps but low saddles in between, a good snow would bury the arches and reveal the humps, making it look like our marine reptile was swimming through a frothy ocean of fresh powder.

The author and his daughters with their sea monster art.

In order to keep packrats from colonizing cover too close to our house (we’ve had Neotoma cinerea, that furry hell, nesting in the crawl space more than once) we keep the woodpile about a quarter mile down our half-mile-long driveway. The girls pulled on their gloves and climbed into my small utility trailer and we bounced down to the woodpile and started loading bucked juniper, pinyon, and ponderosa, a little sugar pine and white fir mixed in. Returning to the house we selected a flat area near the garage and began laying out the logs, starting at the tail and at first using only a single-log construction so as to establish the shape of our giant reptile. As we did, Eryn sat nearby in a lawn chair, reading about Ichthyosaurs to the girls from something she had googled on her phone.

“Ichthyosaurs lived from 245 to 90 million years ago and were widely distributed around the globe,” she reported. “Middle Triassic, Late Cretaceous. They evolved from a group of unidentified land reptiles that at some point moved back into the sea. The name Ichthyosaur is from the Greek, meaning ‘fish lizard.’ Although they swam like fish and looked a lot like fish, they were reptiles. The fact that they developed a lot of fishlike parts is called ‘convergent evolution.’ That means that although fish and Ickys are totally unrelated, they developed similar kinds of fins because it is just useful to have fins if you plan to swim.”

Cracking another Icky IPA along with my joke, I added: “The same way fathers around the world have all evolved the same beer drinking behavior, even though their cultures are unrelated.”

Wisely ignoring me, Eryn continued reading. The girls asked a few follow-up questions, decided to add an improvised fin-log to each of the monster’s humps, paused for water a few times, but mainly just worked at stacking the wood along the spine of their giant reptile, which was beginning to take shape, rising from the gravel pad in a very satisfying way.

“Ickys averaged six to thirteen feet long, but some were much larger,” Eryn continued. “The largest Ichthyosaur fossils ever discovered, which were almost fifty feet long, were found in . . . wait for it . . .”

“Nevada!” Hannah shouted. Eryn gave her a wide smile and two thumbs up.

Because our lizard was so long and sinuous, its body swallowed up a surprising amount of wood, and so we fetched a second trailer load and, eventually, even a third. By the time that third load was placed along the rising, humped spine of our giant reptile it was late afternoon and the already low winter sun was dropping fast. But the kids refused to quit, begging me to fashion a big reptile head, which was the only thing missing from what had become a truly respectable cordwood sea monster. Caroline and Hannah’s desert ocean lizard now wriggled impressively across the gravel and had imposing humps, the largest of which rose five feet from the ground.

The head of the sea monster art created by the author and his daughters.

Knowing I had so little time before dark and that my lack of artistic ability would be a serious liability even under better circumstances, I decided to quickly attach whatever dragony looking stuff I could find nearby. Fatherhood, after all, is the art of improvisation. I first took a twisted log and stuck it into the front hump to suggest a neck. Then I grabbed my drill from the garage and attached a piece of old barnboard to the end of the neck. From a trashcan full of scrap wood I salvaged two small log ends, which I repurposed as eyes, attaching them hastily to the barnboard brow with old deck screws. I screwed much smaller log ends onto the eyes to resemble pupils. I then bored holes down each side of the neck, and into them I jammed pinyon pine branches that I lopped off our Christmas tree, which was still lying on the ground near the wellhead. Finally, I used my chainsaw to cut a flange of root from a big juniper stump, and I inverted it and popped it on the forehead as an improvised horn.

Finishing my hasty work just at dusk, I popped another Icky and stepped back to consider what redneck art had wrought. So awful were the results of my effort that I momentarily wished I lived in Arizona, where I would presumably have been asked by my kids to make a state fossil that looked like petrified wood. Our giant reptile’s head left the impression of a gene-splicing experiment gone wrong, and rather than resembling the noble marine reptile of yore, the skull of this monster looked like it belonged to a cross between a giant lamprey eel, a misshapen desert unicorn, and an inebriated reindeer, and its face was disconcertingly reminiscent of Spielberg’s E.T. I had long since come to view fatherhood as the constant condition of having to publicly admit one’s shortcomings, but even I felt ashamed that at the end of the girls’ remarkable wood sculpture I had produced a head so abominably bad as to turn the wonderful beast into a sort of Jurassic jackalope.

“Well, girls, my work here is done. Thanks to me, your awesomely cool marine reptile does not in fact look like an Ichthyosaur. Not in the least. I’m really sorry about that.”

“That’s ok, Daddy,” Caroline offered. “Our monster doesn’t have to be any certain kind, so long as we made it ourselves. And it really is awesome. This guy can just be our own special made-up kind of desert sea monster.”

The author and his daughters with their sea monster art.

Big sister Hannah was even more consoling. “Dad, you spent all day building this with us, which is double awesome. Why don’t you write a Rant about our big lizard? Then we can just forget about the whole Icky thing and name him Rantosaurus!” As Caroline nodded in agreement, I found myself thinking that a kid’s universe is not only more imaginative than the grown-up world, but also kinder and more humane. Millions of years ago this desert had been ocean, and someday it might be ocean once again. But for one small, already disappearing moment in the life of this place, I was the flawed father of understanding children and the co-creator of a giant sea monster. It would be bad form to ever wish for more.

“Ok, y’all. Rantosaurus it is. Rantosaurus silverhillsii. Not only rare, but unique. Nothing like it anywhere else in the world.”

By now Eryn had come out to “admire my art,” as she put it with a grin, and to call us in for supper. “It looks pretty fierce,” she said. “What do you want it to protect us from? I’d like to be protected from rattlers in the garage and Beauregard slobbering on my work clothes. How about you, Bubba?”

I took one more swig of delicious Icky IPA. “Light beer, illegal offroaders, climate deniers, and the NSA. And house fires. Not necessarily in that order. Hannah, how about you?”

“Dog poop. Oh, and math tests. And when teachers get mad. I want Rantasaurus to just gobble up mad teachers.”

The author looking into the eyes of the sea monster that he and his daughters created.

“I think that’s a fine idea, sweetie,” I said in a tone of genuine approval.

Caroline had one last question. “Dad, I know our sea monster isn’t really an Icky, but is it as big as one – as big as one of those big Nevada ones, I mean?”

“Let’s find out,” I said, taking her hand in mine. We then paced off the length of our monster, starting at the head, which towered over her little body, and tracing the curves of its gracefully winding spine until we reached the tip of the tail. “Well, honey, your Rantosaurus is about forty feet long, which is impressive, but Mom read that the whopper Nevada ichthyosaurs were almost fifty feet long. Are you disappointed?”

“Naaw,” she replied without hesitation. “He’ll keep growing, and next year when we build him again he’ll be bigger.”